by Rod Serling
“I’m not very hungry,” she said after a pause. “And it’s too early for cocktails.” She saw the disappointment cross his face. “What’s your trouble, Mr. Finchley?” she asked pointedly but not without sympathy.
Finchley’s smile was a ghostly and wan attempt at recovery of aplomb, but his voice quickly took on the sharp, slicing overtones that were so much a part of him. “Miss Rogers, my dear, you sound like a cave-dwelling orphan whose idea of a gigantic lark is a square dance at the local grange. I was merely suggesting to you that we observe the simple social amenities between an employer and a secretary. I thought we’d go out...take in a show or something.”
She studied him for a long moment, not really liking the man either at this moment or any other moment, but vaguely aware of something that was eating at him and forcing this momentary lapse into at least a semblance of courtesy.
“How very sweet, Mr. Finchley,” she said. “Thank you, but no thank you.”
Finchley half snorted as he turned his back to her and once again she felt the snobbery of the man, the insufferable ego, the unbearable superiority that he threw around to hurt and humiliate.
“Tonight,” she said, feeling no more pity or fascination, “tonight I’m taking a hog-calling lesson. You know what a hog is, don’t you, Mr. Finchley? He’s a terribly bright fathead who writes for gourmet magazines and condescends to let a few other slobs exist in the world for the purpose of taking his rudeness and running back and forth at his beck and call! Good night, Mr. Finchley.”
She saw his shoulders slump and he was silent. Again she felt compelled to remain because this was so unlike him, so foreign to him not to top her, not to meet her barb head on, divert it, and send one of his own back at her, stronger, faster, and much more damaging. When he finally turned she saw again that his face had an odd look and there was something supplicating, something frightening and something, inconceivable though it was, lonely.
“Miss Rogers,” he said, his voice gentler than she’d ever heard it, “before you do...before you go—” he made a kind of halfhearted gesture, “—have a cup of coffee or something.” He turned away so that she would be unable to see his face. “I’d like very much,” he continued, “I’d like very much not to be alone for a while.”
Edith Rogers came back into the living room and stood close to him. “Are you ill?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Bad news or something?”
“No.”
There was a silence.
“What’s your trouble?” she asked.
He whirled on her, his thin lips twisted. “Does there have to be trouble just because I—”
He stopped, ran a hand over his face, and half fell into a chair. For the first time she observed the circles under his eyes, the pinched look of the mouth, the strangely haunted look.
“I’m desperately tired,” he said abruptly. “I haven’t slept for four nights and the very thought of being alone now—” He grimaced, obviously hating this, feeling the reluctance of the strong man having to admit a weakness. “Frankly,” he said, looking away, “it’s intolerable. Things have been happening, Miss Rogers, very odd things.”
“Go on.”
He pointed toward the TV set. “That...that thing over there. It goes on late at night and wakes me up. It goes on all by itself.” His eyes swept across the room toward the hall. “And that portable radio I used to keep in my bedroom. It went on and off, just as I was going to sleep.”
His head went down and when he looked up his eyes darted around paranoically. “There’s a conspiracy in this house, Miss Rogers.” Seeing her expression, he raised his voice in rebuttal. “That’s exactly what it is—a conspiracy! The television set, the radio, lighters, electric clocks, that...that miserable car I drive.”
He rose from the chair, his face white and intense. “Last night I drove it into the driveway. Just drove it into the driveway, mind you. Very slowly. Very carefully.” He took a step toward her, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides. “The wheel turned in my hands. Hear me? The wheel turned in my hand! The car deliberately hit the side of the garage. Broke a headlight.—That clock up there on the mantelpiece!”
Edith looked at the mantelpiece. There was no clock there. She turned to him questioningly.
“I...I threw it away,” Finchley announced lamely. Then, pointedly and forcefully he said, “What I’m getting at, Miss Rogers, is that for as long as I’ve lived...I’ve never been able to operate machines.” He spit out the last word as if it were some kind of epithet.
Edith Rogers stared at him, for the first time seeing a part of the man that had been kept hidden beneath a veneer and a smoking jacket.
“Mr. Finchley,” she said very softly, “I think you ought to see a doctor.”
Finchley’s eyes went wide and the face and the voice were the Finchley of old. “A doctor,” he shrieked at her. “The universal panacea of the dreamless twentieth-century idiot! If you’re depressed—see a doctor. If you’re happy—see a doctor. If the mortgage is too high and the salary too low—see a doctor. You,” he screamed at her, “Miss Rogers, you see a doctor.” Fury plugged up his voice for a moment and then he screamed at her again. “I’m a logical, rational, intelligent man. I know what I see. I know what I hear. For the past three months I’ve been seeing and hearing a collection of wheezy Frankensteins whose whole purpose is to destroy me! Now what do you think about that, Miss Rogers!”
The girl studied him for a moment. “I think you’re terribly ill, Mr. Finchley. I think you need medical attention.” She shook her head. “I think you’ve got a very bad case of nerves from lack of sleep and I think that way down deep you yourself realize that these are nothing more than delusions.”
She looked down at the floor for a moment, then turned and started out of the room.
“Now where are you going?” he shouted at her.
“You don’t need company, Mr. Finchley,” she said from the hall. “You need analysis.”
He half ran over to her, grabbed her arm, whirled her around.
“You’re no different from a cog-wheeled, electrically generated metal machine yourself. You haven’t an iota of compassion or sympathy.”
She struggled to free her arm. “Mr. Finchley, please let me go.”
“I’ll let you go,” he yelled, “when I get good and ready to let you go!”
Edith continued to struggle, hating the scene, desperately wanting to end it, and yet not knowing how.
“Mr. Finchley,” she said to him, trying to push him off, “this is ugly. Now please let me go.” She was growing frightened. “Let go of me!”
Suddenly, instinctively, she slapped him across the face. He dropped her arm abruptly and stared at her as if disbelieving that anything of this sort could happen to him. That he, Bartlett Finchley, could be struck by a woman. Again his lips trembled and his features worked. A burning fury took possession of him.
“Get out of here,” he said in a low, menacing voice, “and don’t come back!”
“With distinct pleasure,” Edith said, breathing heavily, “and with manifest relief.” She whirled around and went to the door.
“Remember,” he shouted at her, “don’t come back. I’ll send you a check. I will not be intimidated by machines, so it follows that no empty-headed little broad with a mechanical face can do anything to me either.”
She paused at the door, wanting air and freedom and most of all to get out of there. “Mr. Finchley,” she said softly, “in this conspiracy you’re suffering...this mortal combat between you and the appliances—I hope you get licked!”
She went out and slammed the door behind her. He stood there motionless, conjuring up some line of dialogue he could fling at her, some final cutting witticism that could leave him the winner. But no inspiration came and it was in the midst of this that he suddenly heard the electric typewriter keys.
He listened for a horrified moment until the sound stopped. Then he went t
o his study There was paper in the typewriter. Finchley turned the roller so that he could read the words on it. There were three lines of type and each one read, “Get out of here, Finchley.”
That was what the typewriter had written all by itself. “Get out of here, Finchley.” He ripped the paper from the machine, crumpled it, and flung it on the floor.
“Get out of here, Finchley,” he said aloud. “Goddamn you. Who are you, to tell me to get out of here?” He shut his eyes tightly and ran a fluttery hand over a perspiring face. “Why this is...this is absurd. It’s a typewriter. It’s a machine. It’s a silly, Goddamn machine—”
He froze again as a voice came from the television set in the living room.
“Get out of here, Finchley,” the voice said.
He felt his heart pounding inside him as he turned and raced into the living room. There was a little Mexican girl on the screen doing a dance with a tambourine. He could have sworn that each time she clicked her heels past the camera she stared pointedly at him. But as the music continued and the girl kept on dancing, Finchley reached a point where he was almost certain that the whole thing was a product of his sleeplessness, his imagination, and perhaps just a remnant of the emotional scene he had just gone through with Edith Rogers.
But then the music stopped. The girl bowed to the applause of an unseen audience and, when she had taken her bows, looked directly out of the screen into Finchley’s face.
She smiled at him and said very clearly, “You’d better get out of here, Finchley!”
Finchley screamed, picked up a vase, and threw it across the room. He did not think or aim, but the piece of ceramic smashed into the television set, splintering the glass in front to be followed by a loud noise and a puff of smoke. But clearly—ever so clearly from the smoking shambles of its interior—came the girl’s voice again.
“You’d better get out of here, Finchley,” the voice said, and Finchley screamed again as he raced out of the room, into the hall and up the stairs.
On the top landing he turned and shouted down the stairs. “All right! All right, you machines! You’re not going to intimidate me! Do you hear me? You are not going to intimidate me! You...you machines!”
And from down below in the study—dull, methodical, but distinctly audible—came the sound of typewriter keys and Finchley knew what they were writing. He started to cry, the deep, harsh sobs of a man who has gone without sleep, and who has closeted his fears deep inside.
He went blindly into his bedroom and shut the door, tears rolling down his face, making the room into a shimmering, indistinct pattern of satin drapes, pink walls, and fragile Louis XIV furniture, all blurred together in the giant mirror that covered one side of the room.
He flung himself on the bed and buried his face against the pillow. Through the closed door he continued to hear the sound of the typewriter keys as they typed out their message over and over again. Finally they stopped and there was silence in the house.
At seven o’clock that evening, Mr. Finchley, dressed in a silk bathrobe and a white silk ascot, perched near the pillow of his bed and dialed a number on the ivory-colored, bejeweled telephone.
“Yes,” he said into the phone. “Yes. Miss Moore please. Agatha? Bartlett Finchley here. Yes, my dear, it has been a long time.” He smiled, remembering Miss Moore’s former attachment to him. “Which indeed prompts this call,” he explained. “How about dinner this evening?” His face fell as the words came to him from the other end of the line. “I see. Well, of course, it is short notice. But...yes...yes, I see. Yes, I’ll call you again, my dear.”
He put the phone down, stared at it for a moment, then picked it up and dialed another number.
“Miss Donley, please,” he said, as if he were announcing a princess entering a state ball. “Pauline, is this you?” He was aware that his voice had taken on a false, bantering tone he was unaccustomed to and hated even as he used it. “And how’s my favorite attractive young widow this evening?” He felt his hand shake. “Bartlett,” he said. “Bartlett Finchley. I was wondering if—Oh. I see. I see. Well I’m delighted. I’m simply delighted. I’ll send you a wedding gift. Of course. Good night.”
He slammed the telephone down angrily. God, what could be more stupid than a conniving female hell-bent for marriage. He had a dim awareness of the total lack of logic for his anger. But disappointment and the prospect of a lonely evening made him quite unconcerned with logic. He stared at the phone, equating it with his disappointment, choosing to believe at this moment that in the cause and effect of things, this phone had somehow destroyed his plans. He suddenly yanked it out of the wall, flinging it across the room. His voice was tremulous.
“Telephones. Just like all the rest of them. Exactly like all the rest. A whole existence dedicated to embarrassing me or inconveniencing me or making my life miserable.
He gave the phone a kick and turned his back to it. Bravado crept backwards into his voice.
“Well, who needs you?” he asked rhetorically. “Who needs any of you? Bartlett Finchley is going out this evening. He’s going out to have a wonderful dinner with some good wine and who knows what attractive young lady he may meet during his meanderings. Who knows indeed!”
He went into the bathroom. He studied the thin, aristocratic face that looked back at him from the mirror. Gray, perceptive eyes; thinning but still wavy brown hair; thin expressive lips. If not a strong face, at least an intelligent one. The face of a man who knew what he was about. The face of a thoughtful man of values and awareness.
He opened the medicine cabinet and took out an electric razor. Humming to himself, he plugged it into the wall, adjusted its head, then laid it aside while he put powder on his face. He was dusting off his chin when something made him look down at the electric razor. Its head was staring up at him for all the world like a kind of reptilian beast, gaping at him through a barbed, baleful opening in a grimacing face.
Finchley felt a fear clutch at his insides as he picked up the razor and held it half an arm’s length away, studying it thoughtfully and with just a hint of a slowly building tension. This had to stop, he thought. This most definitely and assuredly had to stop.
That idiotic girl was brainless, stupid, and blind—but she had a point. It was his imagination. The TV set, the radio, and that damned phone in the other room. It was all part of his imagination. They were just machines. They had no entities or purpose or will. He grasped the razor more firmly and started to bring it toward his face. In a brief, fleeting, nightmarish instant the razor seemed to jump out of his hand and attack his face, biting, clawing, ripping at him.
Finchley screamed and flung it away from him, then stumbled backwards against the bathroom door. He scrabbled for the ornate gold doorknob, pulled it open and ran stumbling into the bedroom. He tripped over the telephone cord, knocking the receiver off the cradle, and then gasped as a filtered voice came out of the phone.
“Get out of here, Finchley,” it trilled at him. “Get out of here.”
Down below the typewriter started up again and from the destroyed television set the little Mexican dancer’s voice joined the chorus. “Get out of here, Finchley. Get out of here.”
His hands went to his head, pulling spasmodically at his hair, feeling his heart grow huge inside of him as if he were ready to explode and then, joining the rest of the chorus, came the sound of the front-door chimes. They rang several times and after a moment they were the only noises in the house. All the other voices and sounds had stopped.
Finchley tightened his bathrobe strap, went out of the room, and walked slowly down the stairs, letting bravado and aplomb surge back into him until by the time he reached the front door, his face wore the easy smirk of an animal trainer who has just completed placing thousand-pound lions on tiny stools. He adjusted his bathrobe, fluffed out the ascot, raised an eyebrow, then opened the door.
On the porch stood a policeman and, clustered behind him in a semicircle, a group of neighbors. Over their shoulder
Finchley could see his car, hanging half over the curb, two deep furrows indicating its passage across the lawn.
“That your car?” the policeman asked him.
Finchley went outside. “That’s correct,” he said coldly. “It’s my car.
“Rolled down the driveway,” the policeman said accusingly. “Then across your lawn and almost hit a kid on a bike. You ought to check your emergency brake, mister.”
Finchley looked bored. “The emergency brake was on.”
“I’m afraid it wasn’t,” the policeman said, shaking his head. “Or if it was—it’s not working properly. Car rolled right into the street. You’re lucky it didn’t hit anyone.”
The neighbors made way for Finchley, knowing him to be a man of mercurial moods and an acid, destructive tongue. As he crossed the lawn toward his car, he gazed at a small boy with an all-day sucker in his mouth.
“And how are you this evening, Monstrous?” Mr. Finchley said under his breath. He looked his car up and down, back and forth, and felt a cold spasm of fear as the thought came to him that, of all the machines, this was the biggest and the least controllable. Also, wasn’t there an odd look about the front end of the thing? The headlights and grill, the bumper. Didn’t it resemble a face? Again from deep inside Finchley there blossomed the beginning of hysteria, which he had to choke down and hide from the people who were staring at him.
The policeman came up behind him. “You got the keys?”
“They’re in the house,” Finchley said.
“All right then, mister. You’d better pull her back into the garage and then you’d better have those brakes checked first chance you get. Understand?”
There was a pause as Finchley turned his back to him.
“Understand, mister?”
Finchley nodded perfunctorily, then turned and gazed at the circle of faces, his eyes slitted and suspicious. “All right, dear friends,” he announced. “You may remain on my property for another three and a half minutes goggling at this amazing sight. I shall then return with my automobile keys. At that time I should like all of you to be off my property or else I shall solicit the aid of this underpaid gendarme to forcibly evict you.” He looked along the line of people, raised an eyebrow and said, “Understand, clods?”