The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (15 page)

She made one more weak, pitiful protest, “Franklin, please, people are watching—”

“The hell with people,” he shouted. “I’m not concerned with people. People can go to hell.”

He turned and, with sweaty palms, clutched at the sides of the machine, his lips compressed. Burning on his face was the anger of frustration, mixed with the high fever of the bad gambler.

“This is what I’m concerned with,” he said. “This machine! This damned machine.” His anger burned hotter, his frustration took over. He pounded his knuckles against it. “It’s inhuman the way it lets you win a little and then takes it all back. It teases you. It holds out promises and wheedles you. It sucks you in. And then—” He slammed another silver dollar into the slot, pulled down the lever with both hands, then watched as two plums and a lemon showed up on the tumbler and there was the dull click once again, with silence following it.

He was unaware of Flora now, unaware of the people who stood watching him behind her. He was unconscious of the noises, the lights, the sweat on his body, the fact that his mouth twitched. There was this machine in front of him. There was this machine that had a face on it and it had been cheating him and he had to pay it back. He had to revenge himself on it and the only weapons he could use were silver dollars. He put them in, pulled down the lever, watched, listened, waited.

He didn’t see Flora, handkerchief to face, walk away from the machine and disappear out the door. He didn’t hear a man in a cashmere sport coat comment loudly to his wife that, “the little prune-faced guy was a real nut with that machine.” A waiter asked him if he wanted a drink and he didn’t look at the waiter or answer him. There were only two things left in Franklin Gibbs’s world. Himself and the machine. Everything else had ceased to exist.

He was a sour-faced little man in an old-fashioned suit and he stood at the machine gorging it with silver dollars, trying to make it vomit back at him. He was a dope addict now, in the middle of a long and protracted needle, and he never really knew, even at five in the morning when the room was empty save for one blackjack game, one dice table still operating and himself, that in every clinical sense, he’d lost his mind.

Everything that he’d used to sustain himself through his lifetime his willfulness, his pettiness, his self-delusions, his prejudices—he’d whipped together like a suit of armor and this is what he wore as he battled the machine on into the morning. Slip in the coin, pull down the lever. Slip in the coin, pull down the lever. Slip in the coin, pull down the lever. Keep it up. Don’t stop. Don’t break the routine of hand and arm and eye and ear. This was the new chronology of his life function. Sooner or later the machine would pay off. It would surrender to him. It would acknowledge his superiority by suddenly spewing out eight thousand silver dollars. This was all he thought about as he stood there, oblivious to the dawn outside, to anything except that he was alone in the world with a one-armed bandit that had a face.

When the night cashier left and yawned a good morning to his replacement, he made mention of the funny little duck by the machine who’d been there something like seven hours.

“I seen them get hooked before,” he said to his replacement, then shook his head, “but never like him. Never like that buggy little guy over there!”

That was the epitaph to Franklin Gibbs’s first night at Las Vegas, but only to that night. At eight-thirty in the morning, when Flora came in to find him, he was still at the machine.

Marty Lubow had a brief talk with the resident manager of the hotel about eleven in the morning. They talked in passing of a couple of public relations stunts in the offing, the nature of the ad campaign for Sammy Davis, Jr., who would start at the hotel two weeks hence, and, just before Lubow left, the manager asked him about Franklin Gibbs whom several people had mentioned. There is a grapevine of no mean proportions in the Las Vegas hotel circuit. Let a man make seven straight passes at a crap table and within five minutes the information is known all over town. Or let a movie star drop a bundle and make a scene and a gossip columnist has phoned it in within an hour. But even in a town full of characters and caricatures, there was always room for one more. And a sour-faced little man in a 1937 suit was obviously setting a new record for time spent and money lost at one silver buck machine. The manager queried Lubow as to the nature of the beast and Lubow laughingly told him that if Gibbs could hold out till six that evening they could probably set up some picture stuff. This might be a natural for
Life
magazine.

But at three o’clock that afternoon, after Lubow had seen Franklin, he was no longer interested in any kind of press coverage. Quite the contrary. One look at the little man’s face was quite sufficient to have him phone the house physician to inquire somewhat obliquely how long a man could live without sleep.

At five-thirty, Franklin Gibbs had lost three thousand, eight hundred dollars, cashed three checks, downed one glass of orange juice and one half of a boiled ham sandwich, and had come close to striking his wife across the side of the face when, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she had pleaded with him to come back to the room to take a nap.

Franklin Gibbs’s life was entirely funneled into the slot machine in front of him. At this point he had no recollection of ever having done anything but feed in coins and pull down levers. He felt neither thirst nor hunger. He knew he was desperately tired and that his vision seemed out of focus, but there was no question of giving up.

It wasn’t until nine o’clock that evening, after the hotel manager had told him he would be unable to cash another check and Flora had telegraphed his brother in Iowa—a rambling, incoherent telegram which spoke of disaster—that Franklin Gibbs got an ice-cold, clutching feeling in his gut. He had three silver dollars left and he’d reached the point where he kept mumbling to the machine that it was now time to pay off. He was owed eight thousand silver dollars and there wasn’t any question about it. What was the matter with the machine, anyway? Didn’t it know the rules? He kept talking to it, urging it, arguing with it—sweaty, sodden, obsessed. It was just twenty-one minutes after eleven when Franklin Gibbs put in the last silver dollar. The machine made a strange kind of whirring noise and the lever stopped halfway down on its arc, clanked noisily and then stuck. Franklin Gibbs stood stock-still for a long, unbelieving moment and it came to him that right then, right at that instant, he was being taken. This was the moment of the big cheat. Obviously this was the coin that was to have brought him the eight-thousand-dollar jackpot. He had no doubt about it at all. He was supposed to have won this time, and the machine, the machine with the ugly face, the machine that had hounded him by calling out his name, had now stooped to the nadir of deceit and was refusing to pay off.

Franklin felt ripples of anger rise up from deep inside him, anger that began as a trickle and built to a coursing flood. Anger that bubbled and seethed and boiled. Anger that suddenly pinched at him and clutched at him and tore at him.

“What’s the idea?” he shouted at the machine. “What’s the idea, you bastard! Goddamn you. Give me back my dollar. That’s my last one, you miserable, crummy, dirty—” His breath caught up with him and for a moment all he could do was wheeze. “Give me back my Goddamned dollar.”

He hit the machine. He punched it. He clawed it. He shoved it. Two floor men, a cashier and the assistant manager, headed toward him from opposite points of the room, but not before he had broken the knuckles of his right hand and not before he had pushed the machine off its stand to go crashing down to the floor, and not before he had thrown himself on it, tangling himself up in it, cutting his arm against the broken glass that was its nose and bleeding all over the carpet.

They led him out of the room, screaming, crying, sobbing, shouting and fighting. Flora ran after them, wringing her hands and weeping.

The house physician set and bandaged Franklin’s hand, put three stitches in his arm and gave him a sedative. They undressed him, put him to bed, then stood over him while he fell into an uneasy sleep.

The doctor told Flora that it would be best to take him home the following day and that Franklin should have a long session with his own physician when he returned to Elgin, Kansas. He even murmured something about the possibility of psychiatric help later on. Flora kept nodding at him, her face pale and tear-stained. After they had gone she sat silently staring at her husband.

Somewhere in the nether land of Franklin Gibbs’s subconscious he heard a voice clear and distinct. It was produced by coins rubbing against themselves. It was a metallic, clanking, “Franklin!” that suddenly was shouted into the air. He woke with a start and heard it again. Then again. He got out of bed and walked past a frightened Flora toward the door.

“Franklin!” It came from the hall outside. It mocked him. It assailed him. It spit at him. He flung open the door. There was the machine in the corridor, its eyes blinking on and off.

“Franklin,” it cajoled him. “Franklin, Franklin, Franklin.”

He screamed and slammed the door.

“Franklin, Franklin, Franklin.”

The noise of it filled the room and then he saw it staring at him in the bedroom minor. He screamed again and. turning, saw it behind the chair. He backed against the closet door and mistaking it for an escape route, flung it open. There was the machine inside the closet blinking at him and calling his name. He tripped and sprawled on the floor, banging his head against the corner of the dresser, and there was the machine looking at him from the center of the room.

“Franklin, Franklin, Franklin,” it called out to him.

He couldn’t scream any more. He had no voice left. All he had to clutch was his terror. A silent, voiceless terror. He scrambled to his feet and ran this way and that way, now bumping against furniture, now falling into the arms of Flora who scrabbled at him, shouting his name. He opened the door to the hall and there was the machine grinning at him.

The last moment of Franklin Gibbs’s life was spent in a mad dash across the hotel room toward the window. He went through it, taking most of the glass with him, to land two stories below on the concrete walk that surrounded the big swimming pool. He hit it, forehead first, and the loud snap that separated his vertebrae at the back of his neck bore no relationship to any sound that Flora had ever heard before. But she heard this over the sound of her own screaming as she stood at the broken window and looked down at the crumpled figure of Franklin Gibbs in his pajamas, his head tilted at an odd angle to his body. He was quite dead.

No one was allowed to touch the body. Someone had tastefully and compassionately covered it with a blanket. A sheriff’s deputy had phoned for the ambulance and was just now succeeding in getting most of the people out of the pool area.

Mr. Lubow, white-faced with anxiety, was in Flora’s room helping her pack. He was telling her there was a much more comfortable little sanitarium at the other end of the town and he was quite certain she’d be able to rest there much more easily. She sat on the edge of the bed while he talked to her in low, nervous gusts about how sad and sorry they were that this had happened. She was a dough-faced, catatonic sphinx whose life had suddenly drained away. She had a vague passing thought that she should telegraph Franklin’s brother again and she thought additionally that Franklin hadn’t believed in insurance, but both thoughts were dulled and stifled by a blanket of neutral dullness that she let settle over her. She didn’t want to think any more. She was too tired.

Down by the pool Franklin Gibbs’s body lay cold and broken. One lifeless hand extended from underneath the blanket, resting on the concrete. In the dark shrubbery beyond, there was a rattle of noise. A silver dollar fell to the ground and rolled unerringly across the walk to spin to a stop right next to Franklin Gibbs’s hand.

No one in the hotel could explain what the one-armed bandit was doing near the pool where they found it the following morning. It was in pretty bad shape, dented, scratched, with the lever stuck tight and most of its glass broken, but they sent it to the factory for a repair job and it was due back on the line within a week or two. The pool boy found the silver dollar also the following morning and put it in his pocket and Flora Gibbs flew back to Elgin, Kansas, to pick up the broken crockery of her life.

She lived a silent, patient life from then on and gave no one any trouble. Only once did anything unusual happen and that was a year later. The church had a bazaar and someone brought in an old used one-armed bandit. It had taken three of her friends from the Women’s Alliance to stop her screaming and get her back home to bed. It had cast rather a pall over the evening.

From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “The Fever,”
The Twilight Zone
, February 5, 1960, CBS Television Network.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally his life to an inanimate metal machine variously described as a one-armed bandit, a slot machine or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs’s words, a monster with a will all its own. For our purposes we’ll stick with the latter because we’re in The Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK

The sensation was unrelated to anything he’d ever felt before. He awoke, but had no recollection of ever having gone to sleep. And, to mystify him further, he was not in a bed. He was walking down a road, a two-lane black macadam with a vivid white stripe running down the center. He stopped, stared up at a blue sky, a hot, mid-morning sun. Then he looked around at a rural landscape, high, full-leafed trees flanking the road. Beyond the trees were fields of wheat, golden and rippling.

Like Ohio, he thought. Or maybe Indiana. Or parts of upstate New York. Suddenly he was conscious of the words being thought. Ohio. Indiana. New York. It immediately occurred to him that he didn’t know where he was. A new thought followed quickly—he didn’t know who he was, either! He looked down at himself, fingering the green, one-piece set of coveralls he was wearing, the heavy, high shoes, the zippered front that went from neck to crotch. He touched his face and then his hair. An inventory. Trying to piece together items of familiarity. An orientation through the tips of his fingers. He felt a light beard stubble, a nose slightly indented at the bridge, moderately heavy eyebrows, close-cropped hair. Not quite a butch—but close. He was young. Reasonably young, anyway. And he felt good. Healthy. At peace. He was confused as hell, but not at all frightened.