At last, he heard a buzzing, faint at first—then dying away—then—no—yes! Oh, yes, that was them, they were coming home.
He turned off the TV, then went to the front window and looked out just as the last gangly shadow landed on the roof and disappeared down the chimney.
Okay, now, just give it a few minutes, then you move.
He waited until the minute hand past through two twenty, then headed to the garage. Working quickly, he dropped two emergency candles into his pocket, then picked up the can of gas and went out the door that opened into the side yard.
It was so quiet you could hear the lawns sighing. The smell of the place across the street was appalling . . . and then again, there was the much nicer odor of the gas he was carrying.
Rather than try to creep up on the place, he decided on a swift approach. Quiet as could be.
His plan was to go around the back of the house and use the cellar entrance, but as soon as he stepped into the black muck that covered the lawn, he realized that it was tacky. Every step he took made a sound, so he had to go to the front door instead. He would get rid of the shoes after the deed was done. All the clothes. If the cops found raw gas or something on them, he was done. To minimize the sound, he walked on the edges of his feet.
As he approached the porch, he could see that the front door had actually been removed. In its place was a black curtain that was blowing gently in the night wind. Well, this was a break. So far, so good.
Carefully, he touched the curtain. Felt like ordinary cloth. Burlap, maybe. He drew it back, and almost fell backward off the porch, the stench was so terrible. A dense, acidic, rotted stink that forced him to somehow swallow an almost uncontrollable sound of loathing. Bugs and cigarette smoke and tar and, was that ammonia?
Inside, the floors were bare and dry, not tacky like the lawn. So at least he could be quiet.
He opened the gas can—and cursed himself for not having loosened the damn cap before he even started. In this silence, the scraping sound seemed gigantic.
God, but the air was awful. Was it going to give him cancer or something? Just kill him right here and now? What a life—you finally kill off some jerk, you get the dream promotion—and this happens. Usually, his luck was good. Usually.
He went through to the kitchen and worked his way backward, splashing gas. Once he was at the front door again, he waved the curtain to disperse the fumes so that he could safely light one of the emergency candles.
The match lit the whole room, an amazingly bright flare. The windows were black, of course, so it wouldn’t be seen from outside, but what about them, what about upstairs?
He touched the match to the wick of the candle, set it in the middle of the floor, and left fast. The fumes were strong, and they were going to go any second.
He crossed the black lawn and, never mind the noise, stopped to pull off his shoes, then crossed the empty street and ran up to his garage. He put the gas and the spare emergency candles away, stashed the shoes in the trunk of his car, then went straight upstairs.
Shirley stirred. “Where were you?” she murmured.
“Bathroom.”
“Oh . . .”
Dropping off his clothes, he went close to her and folded her into his arms. She might not be a trophy wife, but she was warm and she felt good against him. She sighed, kissed him, and opened herself to him. For an instant, he was in touch with the sweet sensuality that had drawn him to her in the first place, and the love he made to her was genuine.
In the middle of their passion, he heard a faint thudding sound, not even a boom, and, a moment later, saw orange shadows begin flickering across the ceiling.
It had damn well worked! It had worked! But he had to play this very cool. He kept on with Shirley until he could feel her getting uneasy, then see her eyes growing wide as she looked past him. She said, “What the hell?”
He turned away from her, made himself gasp, then rolled off her. “Oh my God!”
They came up out of the bed together, which could not have been more perfect, because this alibi would stand up even to one of the new lie readers, because Shirley really would believe without question that he’d been here the whole time.
He raised the blinds and was absolutely horrified at what he saw. The entire house was a ball of red, raging flames. That black stuff must be inflammable. He hadn’t thought of that. But there could be no question about one thing. Nothing was coming out of there alive.
Except—“Jake, look! LOOK!”
One of the creatures, its angular body sparking with blue flames, came staggering out onto the front porch and collapsed.
Without a word of warning, Shirley took off running. She was already downstairs and out the front door, dragging one of their bedsheets, before he could so much as catch up with her. “Jesus, Shirley, slow down!”
“We have to help!”
The house was a wall of fire, and the creature on the ground lay still, smoke coming up from its body.
Shirley threw the sheet over it.
In the distance, sirens were rising, getting louder fast.
She went down to it.
“Honey, don’t touch it!”
“Jake, he’s breathing!” She pulled the sheet back, and in the flickering firelight Jake saw that the creature was alive, and their eyes met, and he saw the lips—the delicate, complex line of the lips—part just slightly. And he saw something there that he did not understand and did not expect, which touched his heart with pity so great that he sobbed aloud.
“Oh, Jake,” Shirley breathed. “Jake, he’s so delicate. Oh, he’s so light and delicate.”
The firemen came, and, as the situation was being brought under control, an EMS truck appeared. They collected the creature in what looked like a big black pan with no handles. All this time, the creature’s eyes never left Jake.
Did it know?
Maybe, but the days passed and there was no reappearance of the aliens, no questions from the cops. The city engineers came with bulldozers and scraped off the ruins, and rolled out artificial turf. A builder bought the lot, and within weeks a new house was going up, a nice, substantial house . . . for people.
Property values stabilized, and Tom closed without a hitch and went off to his new life in Dallas. The Trillians, happily enough, had already taken the hundred grand the block buster had offered them, and a very nice new family bought their house from him.
But this didn’t matter to Jake, because he was installed in a lovely home just three doors down from Gil Harrison’s place on Terrace Lane.
Mike accepted Jake’s promotion with such good grace that Jake decided it was too good. He began keeping a secret Mike file, because he knew damn well that he’d made an enemy, and, in the end, one of them would have to go. Still, they played golf together and took their kids to movies together, just like always. And Jake built his file.
The aliens not only stayed away from Alta Vista, they never came back to this side of town.
Until one night very late, they did. Or rather, one of them did.
The huge buzzing sound woke Jake up immediately. In fact, it caused him to leap right out of the new brass bed he’d insisted they buy. He wanted a king. He wanted grandeur. Where he slept was important.
The sound stopped, and for an instant he allowed himself to hope that the thing had flown on. But then he heard from the roof, scritch, scritch.
Then he saw, coming down past a back window, the outline of a thin, segmented body and legs. Hideous. Loathsome. In one of its long, complicated claws was a gasoline can.
“Jesus!” He turned to wake Shirley, but she flopped on the bed like a dead fish. “We gotta get out of here!” He shook her and shook her. Nothing. She could not be waked up. Then he ran into Lissa’s room. Her eyes were open but they were strange and dark and she could not be waked up, either. Pete was crying, but when Jake tried to open his door, it seemed to be stuck. He turned to go back and get Lissa, but her door slammed and the join just disappea
red. Before his eyes, it became a wall.
He smelled gasoline.
Running downstairs, he cried out, “No! Oh, for God’s sake, no!”
There it was in the middle of their wide living room, standing there. The gas can was open. The alien stank like a corpse bloating in a steam room, a stench at once sour with rot and nauseating with the sick sweetness of unbathed skin. Its eyes were filmed with mucus, its lips wrinkled and withered. It raised its foul, insectoid face to him and the thin line of its lips parted into what had to be the ugliest smile Jake had ever seen or known possible, a look so malevolent that he thought it literally could have killed a weaker man.
It lifted the gas can and poured. The gas gurgled out, splashing over his four-thousand-dollar couch.
“Please! Please stop!”
It tilted the can back, then stood still, staring at him. The can remained positioned in its claws, which undulated along the red surface like restless snakes. He felt that stare, a million accusing arrows driving deep into his soul. He thought, I have to kill it.
Then it spoke, its voice at once like the rasp of a great cicada and the song of an angel, and it said, “You cannot kill me.”
Which was true, because Jake could not move a muscle. Jake was alive, he was conscious, but his body had been frozen solid.
It smiled again, and this time, despite his disgust and his white-hot hate, Jake saw the grief. “You killed my whole family. I am old and now I am left alone, and you have deprived my children and my grandchildren of their young lives.”
From upstairs came the sounds of Lissa and Pete and Shirley hammering on their doors and screaming and crying.
Every muscle in his body, every cell of him, strove to break the paralysis. He whispered, “Please don’t hurt my family.” And then, again, he saw the pain in that vile face, and knew that the thick mucus dripping from the eyes was its equivalent of tears. And his heart opened a little, and he rasped out a dry, unwilling whisper, “Forgive me.”
Again the voice came, singing like an angel, rasping like a bug. “I can forgive you, but you have marked your soul and my forgiveness cannot erase it.” In its tone, it seemed to communicate something like gentle acceptance, but also great sadness. “We came here,” it said, “to rescue souls.” It sighed. “I am going to show you what you will not allow yourself to see. I am going to show you yourself as you appear to us.”
Jake became aware of a trembling deep in his body, and then a sense of something changing along his spine, as if he was being opened. His body seemed to disappear around him like so much dust.
It was death. The damn thing was killing him and he had to break this paralysis, he had to get away, he could not let it burn the house, burn his wife and kids—
“Because you asked for forgiveness, there is still a tiny part of your soul that’s healthy, Jake, trapped beneath the greed and the cruelty and the hate that defines you. So I will give you a blessing. I will give you a chance to repair your soul by helping others.”
“And you won’t hurt my family.”
Slowly, it shook its monstrous head. “Love your enemy,” it said. Then it pointed toward the kitchen. “Jake, just walk through that door.”
“Walk . . . into the kitchen? That’s it?”
“Through that door.”
Immediately, Jake crossed the living room, went through the dining room, and pushed his way into the . . . kitchen.
Whereupon everything changed. There were strange sounds, booming like a great heart beating hard, sucking noises, deafening roars. And there was heat, and tight confinement and pain, there was red raging pain in every inch of his body.
All around him there was something pulsating, a huge, thick mass of something that he didn’t understand, that was something animalistic, an orifice of some kind.
Wild terror made him struggle, but it was useless, he could not move even a finger.
The creature had tricked him. He was being eaten alive, but by what he could not imagine.
Then light came, immeasurably bright. Clanging, huge sounds. Something like a face, but immense, blurry and terrible, with great, dark eyes and long, thin claws that clattered as they quested toward him.
Then he knew: up there in the mists and immensity of these bizarre surroundings was one of the aliens, its head bobbing as it peered at him.
A voice boomed out, big as a liner’s enormous foghorn, “He’s here! He’s out! We have our little boy, we have our child at last!”
He was swept up into fierce, amazing cold, into agonizing dryness that seemed to burn his skin off his body.
Was he burning? Had the creature lit the gasoline? He thought these must be death throes, and all this light was the fire that was consuming him.
Then a shape swept down out of the haze, and he saw that it was an alien face, the eyes gleaming, the lips twisted in one of their hideous smiles.
Then hands grasped him, enclosing him in their wriggling, snakelike fingers. He realized that he was a baby again, and—but no, this was impossible, this couldn’t happen.
Then they moved him, his body tiny in their great hands, and he was lifted before a mirror, and he saw in that mirror a tiny black bug of a creature, wet and writhing, its little fingers wriggling like worms, its legs those of a stick-insect running helplessly in the air.
He screamed. He screamed as he had never screamed before. And then he heard a tinkling sound, gentle like a spray of water, and knew that it was laughter, and the rattling, kindly voice of an angel said, “Oh, little one, you are so loud.”
“I think he’s hungry, hon.”
“Of course he is, my dear little man.”
There came toward him a red button dripping with a white substance, and it was beautiful to him, so much so that his heart began roaring, and his whole body struggled and fought to get closer.
He let himself be pressed against his mother’s red, flowing breast, and he felt himself in her claws, and his whole body vibrated with the delight of her touch, a burning, furious pleasure, and then he saw, like a great sun, her teat bouncing toward his mouth, and his lips caressed it and he tasted of his mother’s milk.
It has been called the milk of forgetting, mother’s milk, for its sweetness fills both the body and the mind, washing us clean of our pasts. We are left empty by its fumes and flavor, ready to try again in the land of life. And we set out once more, seeking in ourselves the compassion and the tenderness—the innocence in experience—that is our one true goal.
Jake became once again an empty baby full of hungers and vibrant with possibilities, a dark little insect shrieking for its mother, its little claws grasping the teat, its narrow lips sucking with all its might, feeling the hot delight of the milk in its throat.
While his father held his tiny foot and his mother caressed his black, bald head, the little creature drank at his mother’s teat. As gently as that, Jake fell away into the past, and he gained the great chance to repair the evil he had done by living among the angels and doing their hard work of salvation, and was born again.
Jake Martin had a treasure map, and he was mean enough and hard enough to follow it all the way to the end of the line. But he was given a second chance by somebody he neither understood nor expected, but who had the sort of powers—and the sort of heart—that you find only in the Twilight Zone.
It is my privilege to include this previously unpublished treatment that gives a glimpse into the mind of Rod Serling. This treatment for “El Moe” is Rod at his classic best, showing incredible attention to detail, fully developed characters, and the trademark twists that his episodes were known for. Although we don’t know if this treatment was written as a Twilight Zone episode, it is very easy to see how this plot might have played out on the small screen. . . .
T
he Mexican side of the Texas–Mexico border, circa early 1920s. It’s a time of turmoil and tension; Model As and bandoliers and Federales; a running, bleeding, protracted three-way battle between tyrants, bandits, and
the patient, long-suffering peon who stands in the middle of both.
A small Mexican town. Siesta time in a hot noon sun. Horses sleep on their feet; men sleep under their sombreros; dogs sleep in the shade of the men; even flies sleep. Off in the distance there is a sound like thunder. A dog pricks up an ear and opens one eye. A horse whinnies. A fly buzzes off and finally the sleeping men awake to the noise. The noise becomes an object. A Cavalry troop of Federales, resplendent in ornate uniforms, led by an iron-jawed, pig-eyed Colonel of Cavalry. This is Ruiz. He leads his men through the village. They steal a few chickens, a couple of pigs. They drink everything in sight in the cantina and break what they can’t drink. Most explicit: this is a weekly raid and nobody holds up a hand against them. Nobody dares. The Colonel visits the home of an ancient Mexican. He’s badgered and bullied. They ask him what became of the legendary hero known as The Falcon. Where is this champion of the little man who rode across the dusty earth ten years before—a brace of pistols and a cutlass shining in the sun? This black-bearded beauty who used to strike down the Federales—only to disappear after a battle. Almost everyone agrees that he was killed and buried, but a persistent little legend says that he is only biding his time—ready to come back in the defense of the men and the soil. The Colonel and his men leave and the wizened little parchment-thin patriarch retires to a back room of his house, opens up a secret panel to reveal pictures of The Falcon. There he is in paint—big and resplendent—bush-bearded and every inch the hero. The old man gazes sadly upon the portrait. “El Nombre de Dios—El Falcon—if you are still alive, come back and give us salvation. In or out of the grave—come back to us.”
His name is Moe Weintraub. He’s a peddler of nostrums, pots and pans, liniments, and anything else he can lay his hands on that can be turned over for a dime profit. He speaks fluent Spanish because for a period in an altogether misbegotten life, he had spent some Army time and served on many a foray into Mexican territory hunting down bandits. He’s glib, tough as nails, shrewd, and reprehensibly without a single suggestion of honor. He would sell himself if indeed the body were sellable. He’s in a little Texas border town, setting up his wagon—spewing out his usual line of bullshit. He doesn’t notice two Mexicans staring at him from across the piazza and he’s quite unaware of the fact that no sooner has he been seen than the two Mexicans saddle up and ride like hell south. Straight to the village. Straight to the old man. El Falcon lives! He has been seen. True, he has no pistols or saber. He has a spindle-shanked, splay-footed nag attached to a wagon that is pre-Custer. The luxurious beard is down to a small, straggle-forked Van Dyke. But what the hell can you expect from a man who’s been dead over a decade?
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 35