The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories

by Rod Serling

  Tommy Bishop’s voice continued defiant. It pierced the murmurings and rose above them. “You might not even be able to get to town,” he said. “It was that way in the story. Nobody could leave. Nobody except—”

  “Except who?” Steve asked.

  “Except the people they’d sent down ahead of them. They looked just like humans. It wasn’t until the ship landed that—”

  His mother grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back. “Tommy.” she said in a low voice. “Please, honey...don’t talk that way.”

  “Damn right he shouldn’t talk that way,” came the voice of the man in the rear again. “And we shouldn’t stand here listening to him. Why this is the craziest thing I ever heard. The kid tells us a comic-book plot and here we stand listening—”

  His voice died away as Steve stood up and faced the crowd. Fear can throw people into a panic, but it can also make them receptive to a leader and Steve Brand at this moment was such a leader. The big man in the ex-Marine dungarees had an authority about him.

  “Go ahead, Tommy,” he said to the boy. “What kind of story was this? What about the people that they sent out ahead?”

  “That was the way they prepared things for the landing, Mr. Brand,” Tommy said. “They sent four people. A mother and a father and two kids who looked just like humans. But they weren’t.”

  There was a murmur—a stir of uneasy laughter. People looked at one another again and a couple of them smiled.

  “Well,” Steve said, lightly but carefully, “I guess we’d better run a check on the neighborhood to see which ones of us are really human.”

  His words were a release. Laughter broke out openly. But soon it died away. Only Charlie Farnsworth’s horse whinny persisted over the growing silence and then he too lapsed into a grim quietness, until all fifteen people were looking at one another through changed eyes. A twelve-year-old boy had planted a seed. And something was growing out of the street with invisible branches that began to wrap themselves around the men and women and pull them apart. Distrust lay heavy in the air.

  Suddenly there was the sound of a car engine and all heads turned as one. Across the street Ned Rosen was sitting in his convertible trying to start it, and nothing was happening beyond the labored sound of a sick engine getting deeper and hoarser and finally giving up altogether. Ned Rosen, a thin, serious-faced man in his thirties, got out of his car and closed the door. He stood there staring at it for a moment, shook his head, looked across the street at his neighbors and started toward them.

  “Can’t get her started, Ned?” Don Martin called out to him.

  “No dice,” Ned answered. “Funny, she was working fine this morning.”

  Without warning, all by itself, the car started up and idled smooth, smoke briefly coming out of the exhaust. Ned Rosen whirled around to stare at it, his eyes wide. Then, just as suddenly as it started, the engine sputtered and stopped.

  “Started all by itself!” Charlie Farnsworth squealed excitedly.

  “How did it do that?” Mrs. Sharp asked. “How could it just start all by itself?”

  Sally Bishop let loose her son’s arm and just stood there, shaking her head. “How in the world—” she began.

  Then there were no more questions. They stood silently staring at Ned Rosen who looked from them to his car and then back again. He went to the car and looked at it. Then he scratched his head again.

  “Somebody explain it to me,” he said. “I sure never saw anything like that happen before!”

  “He never did come out to look at that thing that flew overhead. He wasn’t even interested,” Don Martin said heavily.

  “What do you say we ask him some questions,” Charlie Farnsworth proposed importantly. “I’d like to know what’s going on here!”

  There was a chorus of assent and the fifteen people started across the street toward Ned Rosen’s driveway. Unity was restored, they had a purpose, a feeling of activity and direction. They were doing something. They weren’t sure what, but Ned Rosen was flesh and blood—askable, reachable and seeable. He watched with growing apprehension as his neighbors marched toward him. They stopped on the sidewalk close to the driveway and surveyed him.

  Ned Rosen pointed to his car. “.I just don’t understand it, any more than you do! I tried to start it and it wouldn’t start. You saw me. All of you saw me.”

  His neighbors seemed massed against him, solidly, alarmingly.

  “I don’t understand it!” he cried. “I swear—I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

  Charlie Farnsworth stood out in front of the others. “Maybe you better tell us,” he demanded. “Nothing’s working on this street. Nothing. No lights, no power, no radio. Nothing except one car—yours!”

  There were mutterings from the crowd. Steve Brand stood back by himself and said nothing. He didn’t like what was going on. Something was building up that threatened to grow beyond control.

  “Come on, Rosen,” Charlie Farnsworth commanded shrilly, “let’s hear what goes on! Let’s hear how you explain your car startin’ like that!”

  Ned Rosen wasn’t a coward. He was a quiet man who didn’t like violence and had never been a physical fighter. But he didn’t like being bullied. Ned Rosen got mad.

  “Hold it!” he shouted. “Just hold it. You keep your distance. All of you. All right, I’ve got a car that starts by itself. Well, that’s a freak thing—I admit it! But does that make me some sort of a criminal or something? I don’t know why the car works—it just does!”

  The crowd was neither sobered nor reassured by Rosen’s words, but they were not too frightened to listen. They huddled together, mumbling, and Ned Rosen’s eyes went from face to face till they stopped on Steve Brand’s. Ned knew Steve Brand. Of all the men on the street, this seemed the guy with the most substance. The most intelligent. The most essentially decent.

  “What’s it all about, Steve?” he asked.

  “We’re all on a monster kick, Ned,” he answered quietly. “Seems that the general impression holds that maybe one family isn’t what we think they are. Monsters from outer space or something. Different from us. Fifth columnists from the vast beyond.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Do you know anybody around here who might fit that description?”

  Rosen’s eyes narrowed. “What is this, a gag?” He looked around the group again. “This a practical joke or something?” And without apparent reason, without logic, without explanation, his car started again, idled for a moment sending smoke out of the exhaust, and stopped.

  A woman began to cry, and the bank of eyes facing Ned Rosen looked cold and accusing. He walked to his porch steps and stood on them, facing his neighbors.

  “Is that supposed to incriminate me?” he asked. “The car engine goes on and off and that really does it, huh?” He looked down into their faces. “I don’t understand it. Not any more than you do.” He could tell that they were unmoved. This couldn’t really be happening, Ned thought to himself. “Look,” he said in a different tone. “You all know me. We’ve lived here four years. Right in this house. We’re no different from any of the rest of you!” He held out his hands toward them. The people he was looking at hardly resembled the people he’d lived alongside of for the past four years. They looked as if someone had taken a brush and altered every character with a few strokes. “Really,” he continued, “this whole thing is just...just weird—”

  “Well, if that’s the case, Ned Rosen,” Mrs. Sharp’s voice suddenly erupted from the crowd, “maybe you’d better explain why—” She stopped abruptly and clamped her mouth shut, but looked wise and pleased with herself.

  “Explain what?” Rosen asked her softly.

  Steve Brand sensed a special danger now “Look,” he said, “let’s forget this right now—”

  Charlie Farnsworth cut him off. “Go ahead. Let her talk. What about it? Explain what?”

  Mrs. Sharp, with an air of great reluctance, said, “Well, sometimes I go to bed late at night.
A couple of times—a couple of times I’ve come out on the porch, and I’ve seen Ned Rosen here, in the wee hours of the morning, standing out in front of his house looking up at the sky.” She looked around the circle of faces. “That’s right, looking up at the sky as if—as if he was waiting for something—” She paused for emphasis, for dramatic effect. “As if he was looking for something!” she repeated.

  The nail in the coffin, Steve Brand thought. One dumb, ordinary, simple idiosyncrasy of a human being—and that probably was all it would take. He heard the murmuring of the crowd rise and saw Ned Rosen’s face turn white. Rosen’s wife, Ann, came out on the porch.

  She took a look at the crowd and then at her husband’s face.

  “What’s going on, Ned?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Ned answered. “I just don’t know, Ann. But I’ll tell you this. I don’t like these people. I don’t like what they’re doing. I don’t like them standing in my yard like this. And if any one of them takes another step and gets close to my porch—I’ll break his jaw. I swear to God, that’s just what I’ll do. I’ll break his jaw. Now go on, get out of here, all of you!” he shouted at them. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Ned,” Ann’s voice was shocked.

  “You heard me,” Ned repeated. “All of you get out of here.”

  None of them eager to start an action, the people began to back away. But they had an obscure sense of gratification. At least there was an opponent now. Someone who wasn’t one of them. And this gave them a kind of secure feeling. The enemy was no longer formless and vague. The enemy had a front porch and a front yard and a car. And he had shouted threats at them.

  They started slowly back across the street forgetting for the moment what had started it all. Forgetting that there was no power, and no telephones. Forgetting even that there had been a meteor overhead not twenty minutes earlier. It wasn’t until much later, as a matter of fact, that anyone posed a certain question.

  Old man Van Horn had walked through his back yard over to Bennett Avenue. He’d never come back. Where was he? It was not one of the questions that passed through the minds of any of the thirty or forty people on Maple Street who sat on their front porches and watched the night come and felt the now menacing darkness close in on them.

  There were lanterns lit all along Maple Street by ten o’clock. Candles shone through living-room windows and cast flickering, unsteady shadows all along the street. Groups of people huddled on front lawns around their lanterns and a soft murmur of voices was carried over the Indian-summer night air. All eyes eventually were drawn to Ned Rosen’s front porch.

  He sat there on the railing, observing the little points of light spotted around in the darkness. He knew he was surrounded. He was the animal at bay.

  His wife came out on the porch and brought him a glass of lemonade. Her face was white and strained. Like her husband, Ann Rosen was a gentle person, unarmored by temper or any proclivity for outrage. She stood close to her husband now on the darkened porch feeling the suspicion that flowed from the people around lanterns, thinking to herself that these were people she had entertained in her house. These were women she talked to over clotheslines in the back yard; people who had been friends and neighbors only that morning. Oh dear God, could all this have happened in those few hours? It must be a nightmare, she thought. It had to be a nightmare that she could wake up from. It couldn’t be anything else.

  Across the street Mabel Farnsworth, Charlie’s wife, shook her head and clucked at her husband who was drinking a can of beer. “It just doesn’t seem right though, Charlie, keeping watch on them. Why he was right when he said he was one of our neighbors. I’ve known Ann Rosen ever since they moved in. We’ve been good friends.”

  Charlie Farnsworth turned to her disgustedly. “That don’t prove a thing,” he said. “Any guy who’d spend his time lookin’ up at the sky early in the morning—well there’s something wrong with that kind of person. There’s something that ain’t legitimate. Maybe under normal circumstances we could let it go by. But these aren’t normal circumstances.” He turned and pointed toward the street. “Look at that,” he said. “Nothin’ but candles and lanterns. Why it’s like goin’ back into the Dark Ages or something!”

  He was right. Maple Street had changed with the night. The flickering lights had done something to its character. It looked odd and menacing and very different. Up and down the street, people noticed it. The change in Maple Street. It was the feeling one got after being away from home for many, many years and then returning. There was a vague familiarity about it, but it wasn’t the same. It was different.

  Ned Rosen and his wife heard footsteps coming toward their house. Ned got up from the railing and shouted out into the darkness.

  “Whoever it is, just stay right where you are. I don’t want any trouble, but if anybody sets foot on my porch, that’s what they’re going to get—trouble!” He saw that it was Steve Brand and his features relaxed.

  “Ned,” Steve began.

  Ned Rosen cut him off. “I’ve already explained to you people, I don’t sleep very well at night sometimes. I get up and I take a walk and I look up at the sky. I look at the stars.”

  Ann Rosen’s voice shook as she stood alongside of him, “That’s exactly what he does. Why this whole thing, it’s—it’s some kind of madness or something.”

  Steve Brand stood on the sidewalk and nodded grimly. “That’s exactly what it is—some kind of madness.”

  Charlie Farnsworth’s voice from the opposite yard was spiteful. “You’d best watch who you’re seen with, Steve. Until we get this all straightened out, you ain’t exactly above suspicion yourself.”

  Steve whirled around to the outline of the fat figure that stood behind the lantern in the other yard. “Or you either, Charlie!” he shouted. “Or any of the rest of us!”

  Mrs. Sharp’s voice came from the darkness across the street. “What I’d like to know is—what are we going to do? Just stand around here all night?”

  “There’s nothin’ else we can do,” Charlie Farnsworth said. He looked wisely over toward Ned Rosen’s house. “One of ’em’ll tip their hand. They got to.”

  It was Charlie’s voice that did it for Steve Brand at this moment.

  The shrieking, pig squeal that came from the layers of fat and the idiotic sport shirt and the dull, dumb, blind prejudice of the man.

  “There’s something you can do, Charlie,” Steve called out to him. “You can go inside your house and keep your mouth shut!”

  “You sound real anxious to have that happen, Steve,” Charlie’s voice answered him back from the little spot of light in the yard across the street. “I think we’d better keep our eye on you, too!”

  Don Martin came up to Steve Brand, carrying a lantern. There was something hesitant in his manner, as if he were about to take a bit in his teeth, but wondered whether it would hurt. “I think everything might as well come out now,” Don said. “I really do. I think everything should come out.”

  People came off porches, from front yards, to stand around in a group near Don who now turned directly toward Steve.

  “Your wife’s done plenty of talking, Steve, about how odd you are,” he said.

  Charlie Farnsworth trotted over. “Go ahead. Tell us what she said,” he demanded excitedly.

  Steve Brand knew this was the way it would happen. He was not really surprised but he still felt a hot anger rise up inside of him. “Go ahead,” he said. “What’s my wife said? Let’s get it all out.” He peered around at the shadowy figures of the neighbors. “Let’s pick out every Goddamned peculiarity of every single man, woman and child on this street! Don’t stop with me and Ned. How about a firing squad at dawn, so we can get rid of all the suspects! Make it easier for you!”

  Don Martin’s voice retreated fretfully. “There’s no need getting so upset, Steve—”

  “Go to hell, Don,” Steve said to him in a cold and dispassionate fury.

&nb
sp; Needled, Don went on the offensive again but his tone held something plaintive and petulant. “It just so happens that, well, Agnes has talked about how there’s plenty of nights you’ve spent hours in your basement working on some kind of a radio or something. Well none of us have ever seen that radio—”

  “Go ahead, Steve,” Charlie Farnsworth yelled at him. “What kind of a ‘radio set’ you workin’ on? I never seen it. Neither has anyone else. Who do you talk to on that radio set? And who talks to you?”

  Steve’s eyes slowly traveled in an arc over the hidden faces and the shrouded forms of neighbors who were now accusers. “I’m surprised at you, Charlie,” he said quietly “I really am. How come you’re so Goddamned dense all of a sudden? Who do I talk to? I talk to monsters from outer space. I talk to three-headed green men who fly over here in what look like meteors!”

  Agnes Brand walked across the street to stand at her husband’s elbow. She pulled at his arm with frightened intensity “Steve! Steve, please,” she said. “It’s just a ham radio set,” she tried to explain. “That’s all. I bought him a book on it myself. It’s just a ham radio set. A lot of people have them. I can show it to you. It’s right down in the basement.”

  Steve pulled her hand off his arm. “You show them nothing,” he said to her. “If they want to look inside our house, let them get a search warrant!”

  Charlie’s voice whined at him. “Look, buddy, you can’t afford to—”

  “Charlie,” Steve shouted at him. “Don’t tell me what I can afford. And stop telling me who’s dangerous and who isn’t. And who’s safe and who’s a menace!” He walked over to the edge of the road and saw that people backed away from him. “And you’re with him—all of you,” Steve bellowed at them. “You’re standing there all set to crucify—to find a scapegoat—desperate to point some kind of a finger at a neighbor!” There was intensity in his tone and on his face, accentuated by the flickering light of the lanterns and the candles. “Well look, friends, the only thing that’s going to happen is that we’ll eat each other up alive. Understand? We are going to eat each other up alive!”