The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (30 page)

Late that afternoon he walked down the sweeping staircase from his sumptuous bedroom, attired in a smoking jacket, and directed himself to the small study off the living room where he could hear the sound of the electric typewriter. His secretary had come in a few hours before and was sitting at the desk typing from Finchley’s notes.

Edith Rogers was an attractive thirty-year-old who had been with Finchley for over a year. In a history of some two dozen-odd secretaries, Miss Rogers held the record for tenure. It was rare that anyone stayed with Mr. Finchley for over a month. She looked up as the master entered the room, cigarette in holder, holder dangling from mouth. He looked back insouciantly and walked behind her to stare over her shoulder at the page in the typewriter. He then picked up a stack of papers from the desk.

“This is all you’ve done?” he inquired coldly.

She met his stare, unyielding. “That’s all I’ve done,” she announced. “That’s forty pages in three and a half hours. That’s the best I can do, Mr. Finchley.”

He waggled a finger at the typewriter. “It’s that...that idiotic gadget of yours. Thomas Jefferson wrote out the preamble to the Constitution with a feather quill and it took him half a day.”

The secretary turned in her chair and looked directly up into his face. “Why don’t you hire Mr. Jefferson?” she said quietly.

Finchley’s eyebrow, which was one of the most mobile features in a mobile face, shot up alarmingly. “Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “with what degree of distaste I view insubordination?”

Edith Rogers bent over the typewriter. “Often and endlessly,” she said. Then she straightened up. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Finchley,” she said, rising and reaching for her bag, “you get yourself another girl, somebody with three arms and with roughly the sensitivity of an alligator. Then you can work together till death do you part. As for me—” she shut her pocketbook “—I’ve had it!”

“And you are going where?” Finchley asked her as she started into the living room.

“Where?” the girl answered, turning toward him. “I think I might take in Bermuda for a couple of weeks. Or Mexico City. Or perhaps a quiet sanitarium on the banks of the Hudson. Any place,” she continued, as she walked across the room toward the hall, “where I can be away from the highly articulate, oh so sophisticated,
bon vivant
of America’s winers and diners—Mr. Bartlett Finchley.”

She paused for breath in the hall and found him staring at her from the living room.

“You’ve even got me talking like you,” she said angrily. “But I’ll tell you what you
won’t
get me to do. You won’t turn me into a female Finchley with a pinched little acorn for a heart and a mean, petty, jaundiced view of everybody else in the world!”

Finchley’s instinct conjured up a tart, biting, cutting, and irreproachable reply, but something else deep inside shut it off. He stood for a moment with his mouth open, then he bit his lip and said very quietly in a tone she was quite unfamiliar with, “Miss Rogers...please don’t leave.”

She noticed something in his face that she had never seen before. It was an unfrocked, naked fear so unlike him as to be unbelievable. “I beg your pardon? she asked very softly.

Finchley turned away, embarrassed. “I do wish you’d...you’d stay for a little bit.” He waved an arm in the general direction of the study. “I don’t mean for work. All that can wait. I was just thinking...well...we could have dinner or something, or perhaps a cocktail.” He turned to her expectantly.

“I’m not very hungry,” she said after a pause. “And it’s too early for cocktails.” She saw the disappointment cross his face. “What’s your trouble, Mr. Finchley?” she asked pointedly but not without sympathy.

Finchley’s smile was a ghostly and wan attempt at recovery of aplomb, but his voice quickly took on the sharp, slicing overtones that were so much a part of him. “Miss Rogers, my dear, you sound like a cave-dwelling orphan whose idea of a gigantic lark is a square dance at the local grange. I was merely suggesting to you that we observe the simple social amenities between an employer and a secretary. I thought we’d go out...take in a show or something.”

She studied him for a long moment, not really liking the man either at this moment or any other moment, but vaguely aware of something that was eating at him and forcing this momentary lapse into at least a semblance of courtesy.

“How very sweet, Mr. Finchley,” she said. “Thank you, but no thank you.”

Finchley half snorted as he turned his back to her and once again she felt the snobbery of the man, the insufferable ego, the unbearable superiority that he threw around to hurt and humiliate.

“Tonight,” she said, feeling no more pity or fascination, “tonight I’m taking a hog-calling lesson. You know what a hog is, don’t you, Mr. Finchley? He’s a terribly bright fathead who writes for gourmet magazines and condescends to let a few other slobs exist in the world for the purpose of taking his rudeness and running back and forth at his beck and call! Good night, Mr. Finchley.”

She saw his shoulders slump and he was silent. Again she felt compelled to remain because this was so unlike him, so foreign to him not to top her, not to meet her barb head on, divert it, and send one of his own back at her, stronger, faster, and much more damaging. When he finally turned she saw again that his face had an odd look and there was something supplicating, something frightening and something, inconceivable though it was, lonely.

“Miss Rogers,” he said, his voice gentler than she’d ever heard it, “before you do...before you go—” he made a kind of halfhearted gesture, “—have a cup of coffee or something.” He turned away so that she would be unable to see his face. “I’d like very much,” he continued, “I’d like very much not to be alone for a while.”

Edith Rogers came back into the living room and stood close to him. “Are you ill?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Bad news or something?”

“No.”

There was a silence.

“What’s your trouble?” she asked.

He whirled on her, his thin lips twisted. “Does there have to be trouble just because I—”

He stopped, ran a hand over his face, and half fell into a chair. For the first time she observed the circles under his eyes, the pinched look of the mouth, the strangely haunted look.

“I’m desperately tired,” he said abruptly. “I haven’t slept for four nights and the very thought of being alone now—” He grimaced, obviously hating this, feeling the reluctance of the strong man having to admit a weakness. “Frankly,” he said, looking away, “it’s intolerable. Things have been happening, Miss Rogers, very odd things.”

“Go on.”

He pointed toward the TV set. “That...that thing over there. It goes on late at night and wakes me up. It goes on all by itself.” His eyes swept across the room toward the hall. “And that portable radio I used to keep in my bedroom. It went on and off, just as I was going to sleep.”

His head went down and when he looked up his eyes darted around paranoically. “There’s a conspiracy in this house, Miss Rogers.” Seeing her expression, he raised his voice in rebuttal. “That’s exactly what it is—a conspiracy! The television set, the radio, lighters, electric clocks, that...that miserable car I drive.”

He rose from the chair, his face white and intense. “Last night I drove it into the driveway. Just drove it into the driveway, mind you. Very slowly. Very carefully.” He took a step toward her, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides. “The wheel turned in my hands. Hear me?
The wheel turned in my hand!
The car deliberately hit the side of the garage. Broke a headlight.—That clock up there on the mantelpiece!”

Edith looked at the mantelpiece. There was no clock there. She turned to him questioningly.

“I...I threw it away,” Finchley announced lamely. Then, pointedly and forcefully he said, “What I’m getting at, Miss Rogers, is that for as long as I’ve lived...I’ve never been able to operate
machines.
” He spit out the last word as if it were some kind of epithet.

Edith Rogers stared at him, for the first time seeing a part of the man that had been kept hidden beneath a veneer and a smoking jacket.

“Mr. Finchley,” she said very softly, “I think you ought to see a doctor.”

Finchley’s eyes went wide and the face and the voice were the Finchley of old. “A
doctor
,” he shrieked at her. “The universal panacea of the dreamless twentieth-century idiot! If you’re depressed—see a doctor. If you’re happy—see a doctor. If the mortgage is too high and the salary too low—see a doctor. You,” he screamed at her, “Miss Rogers,
you
see a doctor.” Fury plugged up his voice for a moment and then he screamed at her again. “I’m a logical, rational, intelligent man. I know what I see. I know what I hear. For the past three months I’ve been seeing and hearing a collection of wheezy Frankensteins whose whole purpose is to destroy me! Now what do you think about
that
, Miss Rogers!”

The girl studied him for a moment. “I think you’re terribly ill, Mr. Finchley. I think you need medical attention.” She shook her head. “I think you’ve got a very bad case of nerves from lack of sleep and I think that way down deep you yourself realize that these are nothing more than delusions.”

She looked down at the floor for a moment, then turned and started out of the room.

“Now where are you going?” he shouted at her.

“You don’t need company, Mr. Finchley,” she said from the hall. “You need analysis.”

He half ran over to her, grabbed her arm, whirled her around.

“You’re no different from a cog-wheeled, electrically generated metal machine yourself. You haven’t an iota of compassion or sympathy.”

She struggled to free her arm. “Mr. Finchley, please let me go.”

“I’ll let you go,” he yelled, “when I get good and ready to let you go!”

Edith continued to struggle, hating the scene, desperately wanting to end it, and yet not knowing how.

“Mr. Finchley,” she said to him, trying to push him off, “this is ugly. Now please let me go.” She was growing frightened.
“Let go of me!”

Suddenly, instinctively, she slapped him across the face. He dropped her arm abruptly and stared at her as if disbelieving that anything of this sort could happen to him. That he, Bartlett Finchley, could be struck by a woman. Again his lips trembled and his features worked. A burning fury took possession of him.

“Get out of here,” he said in a low, menacing voice, “and don’t come back!”

“With distinct pleasure,” Edith said, breathing heavily, “and with manifest relief.” She whirled around and went to the door.

“Remember,” he shouted at her, “don’t come back. I’ll send you a check. I will not be intimidated by machines, so it follows that no empty-headed little broad with a mechanical face can do anything to me either.”

She paused at the door, wanting air and freedom and most of all to get out of there. “Mr. Finchley,” she said softly, “in this conspiracy you’re suffering...this mortal combat between you and the appliances—I
hope you get licked!”

She went out and slammed the door behind her. He stood there motionless, conjuring up some line of dialogue he could fling at her, some final cutting witticism that could leave him the winner. But no inspiration came and it was in the midst of this that he suddenly heard the electric typewriter keys.

He listened for a horrified moment until the sound stopped. Then he went to his study There was paper in the typewriter. Finchley turned the roller so that he could read the words on it. There were three lines of type and each one read, “Get out of here, Finchley.”

That was what the typewriter had written all by itself. “Get out of here, Finchley.” He ripped the paper from the machine, crumpled it, and flung it on the floor.

“Get out of here, Finchley,” he said aloud. “Goddamn you. Who are you, to tell me to get out of here?” He shut his eyes tightly and ran a fluttery hand over a perspiring face. “Why this is...this is absurd. It’s a typewriter. It’s a machine. It’s a silly, Goddamn machine—”

He froze again as a voice came from the television set in the living room.

“Get out of here, Finchley,” the voice said.

He felt his heart pounding inside him as he turned and raced into the living room. There was a little Mexican girl on the screen doing a dance with a tambourine. He could have sworn that each time she clicked her heels past the camera she stared pointedly at him. But as the music continued and the girl kept on dancing, Finchley reached a point where he was almost certain that the whole thing was a product of his sleeplessness, his imagination, and perhaps just a remnant of the emotional scene he had just gone through with Edith Rogers.

But then the music stopped. The girl bowed to the applause of an unseen audience and, when she had taken her bows, looked directly out of the screen into Finchley’s face.

She smiled at him and said very clearly, “You’d better get out of here, Finchley!”

Finchley screamed, picked up a vase, and threw it across the room. He did not think or aim, but the piece of ceramic smashed into the television set, splintering the glass in front to be followed by a loud noise and a puff of smoke. But clearly—ever so clearly from the smoking shambles of its interior—came the girl’s voice again.

“You’d better get out of here, Finchley,” the voice said, and Finchley screamed again as he raced out of the room, into the hall and up the stairs.

On the top landing he turned and shouted down the stairs. “All right! All right, you machines! You’re not going to intimidate me! Do you hear me? You are not going to intimidate
me
! You...you machines!”

And from down below in the study—dull, methodical, but distinctly audible—came the sound of typewriter keys and Finchley knew what they were writing. He started to cry, the deep, harsh sobs of a man who has gone without sleep, and who has closeted his fears deep inside.

He went blindly into his bedroom and shut the door, tears rolling down his face, making the room into a shimmering, indistinct pattern of satin drapes, pink walls, and fragile Louis XIV furniture, all blurred together in the giant mirror that covered one side of the room.