by Rod Serling
He very carefully picked his way through the group and headed back toward the house, fastidiously avoiding any contact like a medieval baron fresh from a visit to an area of the black plague. Not really frightened of catching it, you understand, but playing it safe, just the same. When he reached his house and left the gaping neighbors behind, his shoulders slumped, the eyebrow went back to normal and his cold, rigidly controlled features suddenly became loose and pliable, the flesh white, the eyes nervous and haunted.
At nine o’clock in the evening, Bartlett Finchley had consumed three quarters of a bottle of excellent bourbon and had forgotten all about going out for the evening. He lay half-dozing on the couch, his well-tailored tuxedo crumpled and unkempt. There was a noise on the stairs and Finchley opened his eyes and turned his head so that he could stare across the room toward the hall. The telephone repairman was just coming down the steps. He paused at the entrance to the living room, looked in.
“She’s operating all right now, Mr. Finchley,” the repairman said.
“I’m deeply indebted,” Finchley answered acidly. “Convey my best to Alexander Graham Bell.”
The telephone repairman lingered at the entrance. “You tripped over the cord—is that what you said?”
“If that’s what I said,” Finchley barked at him, “that’s precisely what happened.”
The repairman shrugged. “Well, you’re the boss, Mr. Finchley. But those wires sure look as though they’d been yanked out.”
Finchley rose to a sitting position on the couch and carefully smoothed back his hair. He took a cigarette from a hand-carved teakwood box on the coffee table, careful that the repairman should not see how his fingers shook as he fitted the cigarette in the holder.
“Do they indeed?” Finchley said, concentrating on the cigarette. “Proving what a vast storehouse of knowledge you’ve yet to acquire.” Then, looking up with disdain, he said, “Good night!”
The repairman went out the front door and Finchley rose from the couch. He hesitated, then went to the television set. Its broken screen was a yawning abyss into the darkness beyond and Finchley hurriedly backed away from it.
At the bar in the corner of the room, he poured himself a large drink, downed half of it in a gulp. then stared almost challengingly at the television set. It stood in silent defeat, this time shattered beyond any repair and Finchley felt satisfaction. He was about to take another drink when the sound of the clock chimes suddenly clanged into the room. Finchley’s glass dropped and broke on the bar top. Again the cold, clammy, impossible fear seized him as he looked toward the empty mantel where the clock had been and then down to the floor where he himself had smashed it into nothingness.
And yet there was the sound of the chimes, loud, deep, resonant and enveloping the room. He ran toward the hall and then stopped. From the study came the sound of the electric typewriter, the keys, then the carriage, then the keys again. And still the chimes of the clock joining as an obbligato. Finchley felt a scream building up in his throat.
He ran into the study in time to see the typewriter finishing a final line. He took a stumbling step and ripped the paper out of the carriage. “Get out of here, Finchley.” It covered the page, line after line after line. And then suddenly came another horror from the living room. The little dancer’s voice that he’d heard on the television set that afternoon.
“Get out of here, Finchley,” it called sweetly. “Get out of here, Finchley.”
The chimes continued to ring and then, inexplicably, another chorus of voices joined the girl’s.
“Get out of here, Finchley,” it said, like some kind of vast a cappella choir “Get out of here, Finchley.” Over and over again “Get out of here, Finchley, Get out of here, Finchley. GET OUT OF HERE, FINCHLEY!”
Finchley let out one gasping, agonizing sob and thrust his knuckles into his mouth as once again he ran into the living room and stared wildly around. He picked up a chair and threw it at the television set. It missed and shot past to smash against a fragile antique table holding an expensive lamp, both of which went to the floor with a loud clatter of broken wood and glass. And still the voices, the typewriter, the chimes. And when Finchley, a steady, constant scream coming from his throat like a grotesque human siren, raced back into the hall and started upstairs, another nightmare was heading toward him from the top. There was the electric razor slithering down, step by step, like a snake with an oversized head.
Finchley’s scream stopped and he was unable to conjure up another one, though his mouth was open and his eyes popped and he felt pain clawing the inside of his chest. He tripped and landed on his knees as he tried to reach the door. He yanked at it and finally got it open as the electric razor came unerringly after him.
He tore out into the night, the sounds of his house following him, a deafening chorus of, “Get out of here, Finchley,” orchestrated for typewriter keys, clock chimes, and the hum of an electric razor.
He tripped again and landed in a heap on the sidewalk. He felt the needle of a rose bush through his trousers as he ran toward the garage and was able to scream once again, as the garage doors creaked open and the headlights of the car inside went on and bathed him in hot, white light.
The engine growled like a jungle beast as the car started to roll slowly out toward him. Finchley yelled for help, ran out to the street, tripped and fell, feeling the shock of protesting nerves as the curb tore a bleeding gash down the side of his face to his jaw,
But he had no time for concern because the car was pursuing him. He ran down the street and back and forth across it, and the car, all by itself, followed the contour of the street and refused to allow Finchley out of its sight. When he went on the sidewalk, the car jumped the curb and followed him. When he went back in the street, the car did likewise. It was unhurried, calculating, and patient.
When Finchley reached the corner the car seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then it turned and followed him down the next block. Finchley knew his legs were beginning to give out and he could scarcely breathe. Calling on some hidden resource of logic and calculation to overcome his blinding, numbing fear, Finchley jumped over the white picket fence of one of the houses flanking the road and hid behind its front porch.
The car moved slowly past, stopped after a few yards, shifted itself into reverse and backed to a stop directly in front of the house where Finchley was hiding. It idled there at the curb, engine purring, a patient, unhurried stalker menacingly secure in the knowledge of its own superiority.
Finchley ran diagonally across the lawn back toward his own block. The car shifted its gears, made a U-turn in a wide arc, and again bore down on him. Bartlett Finchley made his legs move back and forth, but they grew heavier and heavier and became harder and harder to lift. His heart beat in spasmodic, agonizing thumps and his lungs were torn bellows wheezing hollowly with overexertion and fast reaching that moment when they would collapse. Pain coursed through Finchley’s body with every breath he took.
As he ran through the night it seemed to Finchley that he’d never done anything else all his life. He tried to prod his panicked mind into some kind of thought, rather than to succumb to the enveloping disaster that followed him with such precision and patience, as if never doubting for one moment that this was simply a cat-and-mouse game and that Finchley was the mouse.
He tripped over his feet and again plowed headfirst into the street, causing the blood to run afresh down the side of his face. He lay there for a moment, sobbing and moaning.
But again there was the sound of the engine and again the bright lights played on him. He rose to his hands and knees and looked over his shoulder. The car was not a hundred feet away, moving slowly toward him, its headlights two unblinking eyes, the grill a metal mouth that leered at him.
Finchley got up again and ran, up one street and down another, across a lawn and then back onto the sidewalk, down another street, down another, then back to his own block.
How he kept going and moving and
breathing, Finchley could not understand. Each breath seemed his last, each movement the final exertion, but he kept running.
Suddenly he realized he was once more in front of his own house. He turned sharply to run into the driveway, past the side of the house to the back yard. Its tires shrieked as the car followed him up the driveway, picked up speed as it went into the garage, smashed through the opposite wall and into the back yard to meet Finchley just as he came around the corner.
All of the insides of Bartlett Finchley’s body constricted at that moment. His throat, his lungs, his heart, the linings of his stomach. He fell once again to his hands and knees and began to crawl across a rock garden, tasting dirt and salty sweat, an hysterical animal, pleading over and over again to be left alone.
His voice was an insane, gurgling chant as he crawled across his patio, toppled sideways over a flight of concrete steps, and wound up on the edge of his swimming pool. The lights went on and the pool appeared a blue, shimmering square carved out of a piece of darkness.
Finchley’s head slowly rose. The car slowly rolled down the small hill toward him, plowing up the earth, the garden, pushing aside the patio furniture in its slow, steady, inexorable pursuit. And Finchley, on all fours, his face streaked with mud and tom flesh, his eyes glazed, his hair lying over his forehead in damp masses, his clothing flapping in torn fragments around him, had now reached the pinnacle of his fear. This was the climax of the nightmare. It was the ultimate fear barrier and he smashed through it with one final, piercing, inhuman scream.
He flung up his hands in front of his face, rose to his shaking feet as the car bore down on him. Then he felt himself falling through space. The wet surface of the pool touched him, gathered him in and sucked him down.
In that one brief, fragmentary moment that lay between life and death he saw the headlights of the car blinking down at him through the water and he heard the engine let out a deep roar like some triumphant shout.
Then he could see nothing more because he had reached the bottom of the pool and his eyes had become simply unfunctioning, useless orbs that stared out of a dead face.
A narrow, irregular line of water drops led from the pool to the ambulance where the body of Bartlett Finchley lay on a stretcher. A policeman with a notebook scratched his head and looked from the pool over to an intern who walked around the ambulance, past the fascinated faces of neighbors and then closed the two rear doors.
“Heart attack, Doc?” the policeman asked him. “Is that what you think?”
The intern looked up from his examination papers and nodded. “That’s what it appears.”
The policeman looked over toward the pool again, then up past the crushed garden and overturned patio chairs, to the big, gaping hole in the rear end of the garage where an automobile sat, mute and unrevealing.
“Neighbors said they heard him shouting about something during the night,” the policeman said. “Sounded scared.” He scratched his head again. “Whole Goddamn thing doesn’t make much sense. The busted garage wall, those tire tracks leading to the pool.” He shook his head. “The whole Goddamned thing doesn’t make any sense at all.”
The intern leaned against the ambulance doors, then looked down at the water drops that led to the pool’s edge. “Funny thing,” the intern said softly.
“What is?” asked the policeman.
“A body will float for a while after a drowning.”
“So?” the policeman inquired.
The intern jerked a thumb in the direction of the ambulance. “This one wasn’t floating. It was down at the bottom of the pool just as if it had been weighted or something. But that’s the thing. It hadn’t been weighted. It was just lying there down at the bottom. That’ll happen, you know, after a couple of weeks when the body gets bloated and water logged.” The intern pointed toward the pool. “He hadn’t been there but a few hours.”
“It was his face,” the policeman said with a shudder in his voice. “Did you look closely at his face, Doc? He looked so scared. He looked so God-awful scared. What do you suppose scared him!”
The intern shook his head. “Whatever it was,” he said, “it’s a little item that he’s taken with him!”
He folded the examination papers, went around to the passenger’s seat of the ambulance and opened the door, motioning the driver to move out. The policeman folded up his notebook. He was suddenly conscious of all the neighbors.
“All right, everybody,” he said, putting firmness and authority into his voice, “the show’s over. Come on now...everybody get out of here and go home!”
The crowd slowly dispersed in soft, whispering groups, voices muted by the fascination of death that all men carry with them in small pockets deep inside them. The policeman followed them toward the front yard, running over in his mind the nature of the report he’d have to write and wondering how in God’s name he could submit such an oddball story to the powers that be and have it make any sense. A press photographer was the last man on the scene. He took pictures of the pool, the departing ambulance, a few of the neighbors. He asked a few questions of the latter, jotted them down hurriedly and, as an afterthought, took a picture of the car that was sitting in the garage. Then he got in his own car and drove away.
The following afternoon there was a funeral and only about nine people came because Bartlett Finchley had so few friends. It was a somber but business-like affair with a very brief eulogy and a dry-eyed response. Bartlett Finchley was laid to rest, a lightly lamented minor character, who would be remembered more for his final torment than for his lifelong tartness. The conglomeration of odd and unrelated circumstances surrounding his death—the demolished garage, the destroyed garden, the wrecked patio—were grist for some gossip and conjecture. But they soon palled and were forgotten.
About a year later, the caretaker of the cemetery where Mr. Finchley was interred, a taciturn, grim man, did tell an odd story to his wife one night at the dinner table. He had been using a power mower on the cemetery lawn, and two or three times it had shown a disconcerting tendency to veer off to the right and smash against Bartlett Finchley’s tombstone.
It had elicited little concern on the part of the caretaker and he brought it up only as an additional support for a rather longstanding contention, oft stated to his wife, that those Goddamned power mowers weren’t worth their salt and a good old reliable handmower was really a far better item, albeit slower. And after this briefest of colloquies with his wife, the caretaker had eaten a Brown Betty for dessert, watched television, and gone to bed.
Nothing more was said.
Nothing more needed to be said.
The Big, Tall Wish
In this corner of the universe, in a shabby, sparsely furnished bedroom inside an aging and decrepit brownstone tenement, stood a prize fighter named Bolie Jackson, staring at himself in the dresser mirror. He weighed a hundred and sixty-three pounds and was an hour and a half away from a comeback at St. Nick’s.
Mr. Bolie Jackson, at thirty-three, was, by the standards of his profession, an aging, over-the-hill relic. At this moment he was looking at the reflection of a man who had left too many pieces of his youth in too many stadiums for too many years before too many screaming people.
He regarded the ebony face, crisscrossed with thin, irregular white scars, and the battered nose that had been smashed this way and that way and finally settled into a shapeless lump, flattened down so that the nostrils were only a fraction of an inch away from an equally scarred upper lip. But, with it all, it was a good face and a gentle face. The eyes were clear, the features expressive, the mouth determined, but not without humor. Nor was the face without character.
In the right-hand corner of the mirror was the reflection of Henry Temple who sat on Bolie Jackson’s bed across the room and stared with undisguised hero worship at the lithe black man who stood in front of him buttoning his shirt. Little Henry Temple, a nine-year-old colored boy, had a personal God named Bolie Jackson and a personal shrine that was
this nondescript bedroom on the floor above his own.
Henry looked happily at the fighter’s shoulder muscles, which rippled underneath the shirt. He noted with an adult satisfaction Bolie Jackson’s poise, the way he stood flat-footed, the grace of the man. He was a fighter, a professional fighter, and he was an expert at his craft.
“You feelin’ good, Bolie?” Henry held out his little fists. “Feelin’ sharp? Take a tiger tonight, huh, Bolie?”
Bolie smiled gently at the little boy’s reflection in the mirror. He winked and held out his fists, aping Henry’s gesture. “Take a tiger, Henry,” Bolie announced. “Gonna take me a tiger. Hard left, then a right. One in the stomach and then lift him up by the tail and throw ‘im out to the ninth row.”
Henry’s intent, serious face in the mirror showed a big, even, white-toothed smile. God, but he loved this kid: He watched the boy get up and come over to him.
“You’re lookin’ good, Bolie.” It was a final judgment. It was an absolute, irrevocable analysis from an expert, albeit a nine-year-old worshiper. “You’re lookin’ sharp, Bolie. Oh, boy, you’re lookin’ sharp.”
Bolie’s smile faded as he bent down to look at the little face and then cupped the small chin, pressing it gently. “You gonna watch it on television?”
“You foolin’!” Henry laughed. “I’ll yell so loud you’ll hear me all the way to St. Nick’s.”
They stood and laughed together, then Bolie finished buttoning his shirt. He leaned toward the mirror studying the scars on his face. He touched the biggest one, the ugliest, the one that had taken three months to heal and now stood out in sharp, dead-white, unpleasant relief over the right eyebrow.