As near as I can see, the only even mildly Lovecraftian element in any Twilight Zone episode occurs in “Long Live Walter Jameson” (written by Charles Beaumont, first aired March 18, 1960). In it we meet the eponymous history professor who seems to know his subject rather too well, as if he had been there at the time. He’s basically Vandal Savage, or Mr. Flint (Leonardo Da Vinci) on Star Trek (Jerome Bixby, “Requiem for Methuselah,” aired February 14, 1969). The idea’s not that unheard of. But it does make him a bit reminiscent of Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. But that’s about it, and, as I say, the idea’s not essentially Lovecraftian.
In the 1980’s revival of The Twilight Zone we had a couple of Lovecraftian episodes, but these had nothing to do with the sainted Serling. One was Harlan Ellison’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “Gramma” (aired February 14, 1986), but it was more Mythos than Lovecraft, not that I’m complaining. Not much, anyway. The other was Mary Sheldon’s “Need to Know,” which I find quintessentially Lovecraftian. In this episode (aired March 21, 1986), Sheldon (daughter of novelist Sidney Sheldon) depicts a spreading plague of sudden insanity. The cause? A resident archaeologist has discovered an inscription which distills the hideous truth about the meaning of existence into a brief sentence. It is so terrible that anyone who hears it at once loses all his sanity points! But, again, not Serling. (Equally Lovecraftian is the premise of the Star Trek episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” written by Jean Lisette Aroeste, aired October 18, 1968.)
Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone does not smack of the dusty pulp pages of Weird Tales, at least not the work of its major writers. It has always seemed to me closer in spirit to Unknown, where editor John W. Campbell offered stories that, though fantastic, had to feature strict logical development and a scientific, or scientifictional basis. L. Sprague de Camp was, of course, one of Unknown’s prominent writers. To me it seemed like horror and fantasy written by the mundane. Not too much imagination, please! The same sort of reaction my Secular Humanist friends have to Harry Potter: too mythological for the kiddies! They’d rather have them reading Richard Dawkins. Somehow this approach was not serious about horror and fantasy, unlike the folks over at Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and Strange Stories. Believe it or not, I mean no criticism. As Honest Abe once said (in a quote worthy of Yogi Berra), “For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.” And I like a lot of it, too. I certainly like The Twilight Zone, after all.
It makes an interesting contrast with Thriller, which Stephen King, hallucinating, called the greatest horror series on TV. Much of this series seems to have been boring murder mysteries (like the worst Alfred Hitchcock episodes), while even the adaptations of stories by Weird Tales luminaries suffered terribly by the artificial prolongation of the hour length of the show. Talk about murder: they beat good stories to death. At least The Twilight Zone didn’t do that.
I regard (as I guess everybody else does) Serling’s Night Gallery as a bit of a disappointment after The Twilight Zone, but there were two Lovecraft adaptations, “Cool Air” (adapted by Rod Serling, December 8, 1971), and “Pickman’s Model” (adapted by Alvin Sapinsley, December 10, 1971), plus the gag “Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture” (by Jack Laird, November 10, 1971). Too little too late? But then I’m not suggesting that the Zone should have had more Lovecraft, only that, given Rod Serling’s ostensible appreciation of HPL, it is surprising it didn’t. Rest assured, I love it as is (though I would have cut that sitcom episode where the Maytag Repairman plays Clarence to Carol Burnett’s George Bailey (Serling’s “Cavender Is Coming,” May 25, 1962).
In fact, if that cigarette-smoking genie from the episode “The Man in the Bottle” (October 7, 1960) were to grant me a wish, after the trillion dollars and having Lovecraft still alive like Joseph Curwen, my wish would be to produce a new Twilight Zone series that would conspicuously not update the show. I would set the episodes in the early 1960s, just like Mad Men does. It would be in black and white. And most of the scripts would be adaptations of more stories (there are plenty left!) by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Henry Kuttner, and others, plus stuff in the same vein by Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, Carl Jacobi, and others. What do you think?
Robert M. Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Reason Driven Life (2006), Jesus is Dead (2007), Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis in Biblical Authority (2009), The Case Against the Case for Christ (2010), and The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (2012).
A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003, and has written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by the writer H. P. Lovecraft.
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The Crevasse
by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud
What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky. Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his facemask, the dry rasp of the fabric against his face reminding him that he was alive.
There were fourteen of them. Four men, one of them, Faber, strapped to the back of Garner’s sledge, mostly unconscious, but occasionally surfacing out of the morphine depths to moan. Ten dogs, big Greenland huskies, gray and white. Two sledges. And the silence, scouring him of memory and desire, hollowing him out inside. It was what he’d come to Antarctica for.
And then, abruptly, the silence split open like a wound:
A thunderous crack, loud as lightning cleaving stone, shivered the ice, and the dogs of the lead sledge, maybe twenty-five yards ahead of Garner, erupted into panicky cries. Garner saw it happen: the lead sledge sloughed over – hurling Connelly into the snow – and plunged nose first through the ice, as though an enormous hand had reached up through the earth to snatch it under. Startled, he watched an instant longer. The wrecked sledge, jutting out of the earth like a broken stone, hurtled at him, closer, closer. Then time stuttered, leaping forward. Garner flung one of the brakes out behind him. The hook skittered over the ice. Garner felt the jolt in his spine when it caught. Rope sang out behind him, arresting his momentum. But it wouldn’t be enough.
Garner flung out a second brake, then another. The hooks snagged, jerking the sledge around and up on a single runner. For a moment Garner thought that it was going to roll, dragging the dogs along behind it. Then the airborne runner slammed back to earth and the sledge skidded to a stop in a glittering spray of ice.
Dogs boiled back into its shadow, howling and snapping. Ignoring them, Garner clambered free. He glanced back at Faber, still miraculously strapped to the travois, his face ashen, and then he pelted toward the wrecked sledge, dodging a minefield of spilled cargo: food and tents, cooking gear, his medical bag, disgorging a bright freight of tools and the few precious ampules of morphine McReady had been willing to spare, like a fan of scattered diamonds.
The wrecked sledge hung precariously, canted on a lip of ice above a black crevasse. As Garner stood there, it slipped an inch, and then another, dragged down by the weight of the dogs. He could hear them whining, claws scrabbling as they strained against harnesses drawn taut by the weight of Atka, the lead dog, dangling out of sight beyond the edge of the abyss.
Garner visualized him – thrashing against his tack in a black well as the jagged circle of grayish light above shrank away, inch by lurching inch – and he felt the pull of night inside himself, the age-old gravity of the dark. Then a hand closed arou
nd his ankle.
Bishop, clinging to the ice, a hand-slip away from tumbling into the crevasse himself: face blanched, eyes red rimmed inside his goggles.
“Shit,” Garner said. “Here –”
He reached down, locked his hand around Bishop’s wrist, and hauled him up, boots slipping. Momentum carried him over backwards, floundering in the snow as Bishop curled fetal beside him.
“You okay?”
“My ankle,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Here, let me see.”
“Not now. Connelly. What happened to Connelly?”
“He fell off –”
With a metallic screech, the sledge broke loose. It slid a foot, a foot and a half, and then it hung up. The dogs screamed. Garner had never heard a dog make a noise like that – he didn’t know dogs could make a noise like that – and for a moment their blind, inarticulate terror swam through him. He thought again of Atka, dangling there, turning, feet clawing at the darkness, and he felt something stir inside him once again –
“Steady, man,” Bishop said.
Garner drew in a long breath, icy air lacerating his lungs.
“You gotta be steady now, Doc,” Bishop said. “You gotta go cut him loose.”
“No –”
“We’re gonna lose the sledge. And the rest of the team. That happens, we’re all gonna die out here, okay? I’m busted up right now, I need you to do this thing –”
“What about Connell–”
“Not now, Doc. Listen to me. We don’t have time. Okay?”
Bishop held his gaze. Garner tried to look away, could not. The other man’s eyes fixed him.
“Okay,” he said.
Garner stood and stumbled away. Went to his knees to dig through the wreckage. Flung aside a sack of rice, frozen in clumps, wrenched open a crate of flares – useless – shoved it aside, and dragged another one toward him. This time he was lucky: he dug out a coil of rope, a hammer, a handful of pitons. The sledge lurched on its lip of ice, the rear end swinging, setting off another round of whimpering.
“Hurry,” Bishop said.
Garner drove the pitons deep into the permafrost and threaded the rope through their eyes, his hands stiff inside his gloves. Lashing the other end around his waist, he edged back onto the broken ice shelf. It shifted underneath him, creaking. The sledge shuddered, but held. Below him, beyond the moiling clump of dogs, he could see the leather trace leads, stretched taut across the jagged rim of the abyss.
He dropped back, letting rope out as he descended. The world fell away above him. Down and down, and then he was on his knees at the very edge of the shelf, the hot, rank stink of the dogs enveloping him. He used his teeth to loosen one glove. Working quickly against the icy assault of the elements, he fumbled his knife out of its sheath and pressed the blade to the first of the traces. He sawed at it until the leather separated with a snap.
Atka’s weight shifted in the darkness below him, and the dog howled mournfully. Garner set to work on the second trace, felt it let go, everything – the sledge, the terrified dogs – slipping toward darkness. For a moment he thought the whole thing would go. But it held. He went to work on the third trace, gone loose now by some trick of tension. It too separated beneath his blade, and he once again felt Atka’s weight shift in the well of darkness beneath him.
Garner peered into the blackness. He could see the dim blur of the dog, could feel its dumb terror welling up around him, and as he brought the blade to the final trace, a painstakingly erected dike gave way in his mind. Memory flooded through him: the feel of mangled flesh beneath his fingers, the distant whump of artillery, Elizabeth’s drawn and somber face.
His fingers faltered. Tears blinded him. The sledge shifted above him as Atka thrashed in his harness. Still he hesitated.
The rope creaked under the strain of additional weight. Ice rained down around him. Garner looked up to see Connelly working his way hand over hand down the rope.
“Do it,” Connelly grunted, his eyes like chips of flint. “Cut him loose.”
Garner’s fingers loosened around the hilt of the blade. He felt the tug of the dark at his feet, Atka whining.
“Give me the goddamn knife,” Connelly said, wrenching it away, and together they clung there on the single narrow thread of gray rope, two men and one knife and the enormous gulf of the sky overhead as Connelly sawed savagely at the last of the traces. It held for a moment, and then, abruptly, it gave, loose ends curling back and away from the blade.
Atka fell howling into darkness.
They made camp.
The traces of the lead sledge had to be untangled and repaired, the dogs tended to, the weight redistributed to account for Atka’s loss. While Connelly busied himself with these chores, Garner stabilized Faber – the blood had frozen to a black crust inside the makeshift splint Garner had applied yesterday, after the accident – and wrapped Bishop’s ankle. These were automatic actions. Serving in France he’d learned the trick of letting his body work while his mind traveled to other places; it had been crucial to keeping his sanity during the war, when the people brought to him for treatment had been butchered by German submachine guns or burned and blistered by mustard gas. He worked to save those men, though it was hopeless work. Mankind had acquired an appetite for dying; doctors had become shepherds to the process. Surrounded by screams and spilled blood, he’d anchored himself to memories of his wife, Elizabeth: the warmth of her kitchen back home in Boston, and the warmth of her body too.
But all that was gone.
Now, when he let his mind wander, it went to dark places, and he found himself concentrating instead on the minutiae of these rote tasks like a first-year medical student. He cut a length of bandage and applied a compression wrap to Bishop’s exposed ankle, covering both ankle and foot in careful figure-eights. He kept his mind in the moment, listening to the harsh labor of their lungs in the frigid air, to Connelly’s chained fury as he worked at the traces, and to the muffled sounds of the dogs as they burrowed into the snow to rest.
And he listened, too, to Atka’s distant cries, leaking from the crevasse like blood.
“Can’t believe that dog’s still alive,” Bishop said, testing his ankle against his weight. He grimaced and sat down on a crate. “He’s a tough old bastard.”
Garner imagined Elizabeth’s face, drawn tight with pain and determination, while he fought a war on the far side of the ocean. Was she afraid too, suspended over her own dark hollow? Did she cry out for him?
“Help me with this tent,” Garner said.
They’d broken off from the main body of the expedition to bring Faber back to one of the supply depots on the Ross Ice Shelf, where Garner could care for him. They would wait there for the remainder of the expedition, which suited Garner just fine, but troubled both Bishop and Connelly, who had higher aspirations for their time here.
Nightfall was still a month away, but if they were going to camp here while they made repairs, they would need the tents to harvest warmth. Connelly approached as they drove pegs into the permafrost, his eyes impassive as they swept over Faber, still tied down to the travois, locked inside a morphine dream. He regarded Bishop’s ankle and asked him how it was.
“It’ll do,” Bishop said. “It’ll have to. How are the dogs?”
“We need to start figuring what we can do without,” Connelly said. “We’re gonna have to leave some stuff behind.”
“We’re only down one dog,” Bishop said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to compensate.”
“We’re down two. One of the swing dogs snapped her foreleg.” He opened one of the bags lashed to the rear sledge, removing an Army-issue revolver. “So go ahead and figure what we don’t need. I gotta tend to her.” He tossed a contemptuous glance at Garner. “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it.”
Garner watched as Connelly approached the injured dog, lying away from the others in the snow. She licked obsessively at her broken leg. As Connelly approached she looked up at h
im and her tail wagged weakly. Connelly aimed the pistol and fired a bullet through her head. The shot made a flat, inconsequential sound, swallowed up by the vastness of the open plain.
Garner turned away, emotion surging through him with a surprising, disorienting energy. Bishop met his gaze and offered a rueful smile.
“Bad day,” he said.
Still, Atka whimpered.
Garner lay wakeful, staring at the canvas, taut and smooth as the interior of an egg above him. Faber moaned, calling out after some fever phantom. Garner almost envied the man. Not the injury – a nasty compound fracture of the femur, the product of a bad step on the ice when he’d stepped outside the circle of tents to piss – but the sweet oblivion of the morphine doze.
In France, in the war, he’d known plenty of doctors who’d used the stuff to chase away the night haunts. He’d also seen the fevered agony of withdrawal. He had no wish to experience that, but he felt the opiate lure all the same. He’d felt it then, when he’d had thoughts of Elizabeth to sustain him. And he felt it now – stronger still – when he didn’t.
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