The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (31 page)

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?”

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.