The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (8 page)

But the room was empty. He thought he heard the sound of distant laughter retreating into the night, but he wasn’t sure and soon he heard nothing. Bedeker carefully folded the document and shoved it in the dresser drawer. He smiled at himself in the mirror, then went to the window and with an impulsive gesture, he flung it open, letting the cold air rush into the room. He stood beating his chest and breathing deeply. He had never in his life felt so free, so unencumbered, and so absolutely healthy.

This reminded Bedeker of his tray, with all its medicines, bottles, jars, lotions, and his book,
How To Be Happy Though Bedridden
. He picked them up and hurled them out the window, smiling as after a few seconds, he heard the bottles smash on the pavement fourteen stories below. Turning from the window, he noticed the hot water pipes. A shimmering heat rose from them and they looked brick red in the lamp light. He approached them gingerly, and stood over them, very slowly raising his hands until he could feel the heat pour into his palms and through his fingers. Red hot, he noted.
Red hot
.

“Proof of the pudding,” Bedeker murmured, “and no time like the present!”

He slammed both palms down on the pipes, listened to the sizzle of the burning flesh, watched the smoke rise in front of his eyes. But there was no sensation of pain. There was no sensation of any kind. He lifted his hands and stared at them. Not a mark. He looked down at the red hot pipes, and laughed aloud. He continued to laugh, his head back, as he walked across the room and threw himself on the bed. He heard the bedroom door open and Ethel stood there staring at him, frightened.

“Walter,” she said nervously. “Is everything all right?”

“Is everything all right?” he repeated. “Everything, Ethel, my love, is delightful. Everything is superb. Everything is perfect.”

He got up and went to the dresser. There was a nail file lying alongside a brush set. He picked it up and smiling happily, jammed the point into his palm. Ethel screamed and fell back against the door.

Then very slowly she opened her eyes to look at the Cheshire-cat grin on her husband’s face. He held out an unscathed palm.

“See, my dear? The hand is quicker than the eye! The proof of the pudding! Witness, my dear...the new Walter Bedeker!”

He started to laugh again, a gusty, roaring, uncontrollable laugh and he paraded back and forth across the room like a rooster in a barnyard. Ethel stood still, her face pale, wondering if she dared leave the room to get to the telephone. Or if at any moment the demented man in front of her might get violent. Her eye fell on the nail file on the dresser. She gasped, bit deep into a knuckle, and looked at Walter in horror. There had been blood on the nail file.

In the weeks that followed, Ethel Bedeker was never sure whether or not she preferred the old days to these new ones. Or whether perhaps it had been an irreparable mistake to have been married or even born. The “new” Walter Bedeker turned out to be a mystifying individual. True, he no longer betook himself to his bed five times a month and screamed impossible demands. As a matter of fact, he was rarely home any more. But his new behavior was equally disturbing.

The first indication she got of what might be expected was a phone call from an insurance adjuster attached to a building firm. Walter, it seemed, had been hit by a falling steel “I” beam that weighed about two and a half tons. It had been in the process of being raised by a chain to the tenth floor of an office building under construction. The chain had broken and the beam had fallen three hundred feet to land on Walter’s head and smash him down into the sidewalk. The foreman on the job first had been violently ill, then had walked very slowly toward that spot in the sidewalk where the horror was waiting for him. He covered his eyes because of a normal reluctance to view mangled bodies. He had also peeked between two fingers, because of the equally normal trait of being fascinated by the horrible. He was to be disappointed on both scores, because Walter Bedeker had crawled out from underneath the beam, none the worse for being squashed, except that his clothes were ripped and his hair disheveled. He had thundered at the foreman that he’d better contact his lawyer because there was going to be one helluva whopping suit in the offing.

It was to tell Ethel all this that the insurance adjuster had phoned, and to inform her that he was on his way to their apartment.

That afternoon Walter signed a waiver of further claim and collected a check for five thousand dollars.

This happened on a Wednesday and the following Saturday afternoon Walter was alone in the self-service elevator when for some strange reason the main cable broke, and the elevator car shot down the two-thousand-foot shaft to be smashed to smithereens at the bottom. The building superintendent heard his shrieking voice echoing up through the shaft and went down to the basement to pry open the wrecked door. Bedeker lay in the rubble with nothing injured, not even his aplomb. (This affair was settled for thirty eight hundred dollars and forty two cents.)

A week later Bedeker was standing in front of a fireworks factory when the building went up in smoke. The newspapers called it the worst fire disaster to occur in the city in twenty-five years. Luckily, it happened after the five o’clock whistle, and only three bodies were found, burnt beyond recognition, in the debris. Bedeker had been buried under a collapsing, burning wall, but had crawled out on his hands and knees right to the foot of a fireman who had fainted dead away upon seeing him. His clothes had been burnt entirely off his body and this accounted for the figure of thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents added to the ten thousand for which the fireworks company settled with him.

In the next five weeks Bedeker was in eight major accidents—a subway collision, a bus overturning, five automobile accidents (in each case the driver swore that Bedeker had stepped out in front of the speeding car), and a decidedly freakish circumstance in a restaurant where Bedeker complained there was glass in his beef stew. It wasn’t until after the manager had paid Bedeker two hundred dollars in cash that the waiter showed the manager a half-chewed glass on the table. By this time Bedeker had walked out in a huff, pocketing his two hundred dollars, and was no more to be seen.

It was now New Year’s Eve and Ethel had timidly asked Bedeker if they could go out to dinner or to a show or perhaps to a nightclub. Bedeker stood at the window, his back to her, not answering.

“Eleven accidents,” he said, “that’s what I’ve been in. Eleven accidents.”

Ethel, who had just mentioned that it was a long time since they’d been dancing together, tried another tack.

“That’s the point, dear,” she said hopefully. “You need recreation. You need to get your mind off things.”

Bedeker continued to stare out the window. “Wouldn’t you think, Ethel,” he asked rhetorically, “that there’d be an element of thrill in eleven accidents. Eleven accidents in which you
know
nothing can happen to you?”

“I guess so, Walter,” Ethel answered irresolutely, not understanding a thing he was talking about.

“Well, it’s a fact,” Bedeker continued. “There should be an excitement in this sort of thing.” He walked away from the window. “
Well, there isn’t
. It’s dull. It’s absolutely without the remotest bit of excitement. In short, I’m bored with it.”

“Walter, dear,” Ethel said softly, “I guess we should count our blessings.’’

“You, Ethel,” Bedeker snapped, “should shut your mouth. You look for all the world like a small gray mouse searching for a piece of cheese.”

She let the cold, hurt feeling subside before she answered him.

“Walter, you can be terribly cruel, do you know that?”

Bedeker rolled his eyes upward and said, “Ethel, please shut your mouth!” He paced the room back and forth. “I swear he cheated me! Mortal-shmortal! What’s the good of it when there aren’t any kicks? Any excitement at all!”

Ethel found herself looking at him in helpless confusion He was Walter Bedeker all right. He was her husband. But he was totally and distinctly different from the man she married, the hypochondriac she had lived with for so many years.

“Walter,” she asked, “do you feel all right?”

Bedeker ignored her. “At least when I was concerned about my health,” he said aloud to no one, “there was an element of risk there. But now there is no risk. There is no excitement. There is no nothing!”

He suddenly cocked his head slightly, his eyes grew wide and he ran past her to the bathroom. She heard him fumbling through the medicine chest over the sink. There was the clatter of bottles and of glass.

“Ethel?” he called from the bathroom. “Do we have any starch?”

Ethel walked toward the bathroom door. “Starch?” she asked.

Bedeker said, “Of course, starch.”

Ethel looked over his shoulder at the bottles he had lined up.

There was iodine, rubbing alcohol and Epsom salts. He had one glass into which he was pouring sizable portions from each.

“Starch!” Bedeker repeated impatiently.

Ethel went to the kitchen and got a bottle of starch from a cabinet under the sink. She brought it to Bedeker and he immediately unscrewed the top and poured this last ingredient into the mixture, which foamed and took on a kind of mustard color. Bedeker held up the glass, and with a quick motion, drank it all down. Ethel gaped at him as he smacked his lips, looked at his face in the mirror, stuck out his tongue, then put the glass down disconsolately.

“You see?” he asked.

“See what?” Her voice trembled.

“See what I just drank? Iodine, rubbing alcohol, Epsom salts and starch. And what did it do to me, Ethel? I ask you—what did it do to me? It did nothing! Absolutely nothing. I’ve just drunk enough poison to kill a dozen men and it tasted like lemonade.
Weak
lemonade.”

Ethel leaned against the door. Her voice was very steady. “Walter,” she said, “I want to know what this is all about!”

Bedeker peered at her elfishly. “What it’s all about? You really want to now?”

She nodded.

“All right,” Bedeker said, “I’ll tell you. I happen to be immortal. I am indestructible. I made a pact with a man named Cadwallader who has given me immortality in exchange for my soul. More succinctly than that, I couldn’t put it.”

Ethel caught a brief look at her reflection in the mirror and wondered in part of her brain how any woman could look so pale and so frightened.

“I want you to sit down, Walter,” she said, collecting herself. “I’m going to make you some tea and then I’m going to call the doctor.”

She turned to leave and Bedeker grabbed her arm, yanking her around to face him.

“You will
not
make tea,” he commanded. “And you will
not
call the doctor. If you had any imagination at all, Ethel, you
might
tell me what I could do to get a little excitement out of all of this. I’ve been in subway crashes, bus accidents, major fires and just now, I drank poison. You
saw
me.” He paused and shrugged. “Nothing! Absolutely nothing. You know what I’ve been thinking?” He left the bathroom and walked back into the living room. “I have been thinking, Ethel, that I should go up to the roof and throw myself down the light well! Smack dab down the light well. Fourteen stories down just for the experience of it.”

Ethel sat heavily down in a chair, close to tears now. “Please, Walter. Please, for goodness’ sake—”

Bedeker went toward the door. “Ethel, darling, shut your mouth.”

She sprang to her feet and raced to the door, intercepting him just as he started to open it.

“Walter,” she beseeched him. “Please, Walter, for God’s sake—”

He pushed her out of the way and went out, down the hall, to the rear stairs and started to climb. Ethel followed him, pleading all the way, arguing, cajoling, but he would have none of it. On the roof, he headed toward the light well. It was a big, square hole covered by glass. There was a small concrete shelf around it that stood only about eight inches high. Ethel immediately got between Walter and the concrete strip, and held out her hands to him.

“Please, Walter,” she said. “Please, my darling—”

Bedeker said, “Ethel, go drown in the tub and leave me alone. I’m going head first down that light well, and I want you to get out of the way!”

He advanced toward her and she backed away from him.

“Please, darling,” she said. “Please come back to the apartment. I’ll make you potato pancakes. Remember, you used to love potato pancakes.”

Bedeker yanked her arm away from him, pushed her aside. “You, my dear,” he said, “are a potato pancake. You look like a potato pancake. You have all the excitement of a potato pancake. You are as tasteless as a potato pancake. Now I’ve told you for the last time to get out of my way.”

She threw herself against him, struggling to push him back and only at the last instant did she realize that her foot was no longer on the level of the roof floor. It dangled over the concrete stoop surrounding the stairwell. In a moment her balance shifted and she had fallen backwards, smashing through the glass, and hurtled fourteen stories down to the concrete courtyard below. Even her scream was a quiet, pathetic noise coming from a quiet, pathetic woman. It was more misery than horror; more a gentle protest than the last utterance of a woman going head first to her death.

Bedeker tiptoed over to the light well and looked down. Lights were going on sporadically on every other floor like the panel board of an elevator announcing the stops. He scratched his jaw, took out a cigarette and lit it.

“I wonder what it felt like,” he said softly.

Some place off in the distance he heard a siren. There was a growing mumble and jumble of voices inside the building. Then suddenly he had a thought. It was a wonderful thought. An exciting thought. He hurried to the door leading to the rear stairs, went down them two at a time, trotted into his apartment and picked up the telephone.

“Operator,” he said, “get me the police, please. Immediately. It’s an emergency.” After a moment he heard the voice of a desk sergeant at the local precinct. “Hello? Is this the police station? Well, this is Walter Bedeker, 11 North 7th Street. That’s correct. Apartment 12B. Will you please come over here right away. No, no trouble. I just killed my wife. That’s right. Yes, I’ll stay right here. Good-by.”