The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (32 page)

Finchley ran diagonally across the lawn back toward his own block. The car shifted its gears, made a U-turn in a wide arc, and again bore down on him. Bartlett Finchley made his legs move back and forth, but they grew heavier and heavier and became harder and harder to lift. His heart beat in spasmodic, agonizing thumps and his lungs were torn bellows wheezing hollowly with overexertion and fast reaching that moment when they would collapse. Pain coursed through Finchley’s body with every breath he took.

As he ran through the night it seemed to Finchley that he’d never done anything else all his life. He tried to prod his panicked mind into some kind of thought, rather than to succumb to the enveloping disaster that followed him with such precision and patience, as if never doubting for one moment that this was simply a cat-and-mouse game and that Finchley was the mouse.

He tripped over his feet and again plowed headfirst into the street, causing the blood to run afresh down the side of his face. He lay there for a moment, sobbing and moaning.

But again there was the sound of the engine and again the bright lights played on him. He rose to his hands and knees and looked over his shoulder. The car was not a hundred feet away, moving slowly toward him, its headlights two unblinking eyes, the grill a metal mouth that leered at him.

Finchley got up again and ran, up one street and down another, across a lawn and then back onto the sidewalk, down another street, down another, then back to his own block.

How he kept going and moving and breathing, Finchley could not understand. Each breath seemed his last, each movement the final exertion, but he kept running.

Suddenly he realized he was once more in front of his own house. He turned sharply to run into the driveway, past the side of the house to the back yard. Its tires shrieked as the car followed him up the driveway, picked up speed as it went into the garage, smashed through the opposite wall and into the back yard to meet Finchley just as he came around the corner.

All of the insides of Bartlett Finchley’s body constricted at that moment. His throat, his lungs, his heart, the linings of his stomach. He fell once again to his hands and knees and began to crawl across a rock garden, tasting dirt and salty sweat, an hysterical animal, pleading over and over again to be left alone.

His voice was an insane, gurgling chant as he crawled across his patio, toppled sideways over a flight of concrete steps, and wound up on the edge of his swimming pool. The lights went on and the pool appeared a blue, shimmering square carved out of a piece of darkness.

Finchley’s head slowly rose. The car slowly rolled down the small hill toward him, plowing up the earth, the garden, pushing aside the patio furniture in its slow, steady, inexorable pursuit. And Finchley, on all fours, his face streaked with mud and tom flesh, his eyes glazed, his hair lying over his forehead in damp masses, his clothing flapping in torn fragments around him, had now reached the pinnacle of his fear. This was the climax of the nightmare. It was the ultimate fear barrier and he smashed through it with one final, piercing, inhuman scream.

He flung up his hands in front of his face, rose to his shaking feet as the car bore down on him. Then he felt himself falling through space. The wet surface of the pool touched him, gathered him in and sucked him down.

In that one brief, fragmentary moment that lay between life and death he saw the headlights of the car blinking down at him through the water and he heard the engine let out a deep roar like some triumphant shout.

Then he could see nothing more because he had reached the bottom of the pool and his eyes had become simply unfunctioning, useless orbs that stared out of a dead face.

A narrow, irregular line of water drops led from the pool to the ambulance where the body of Bartlett Finchley lay on a stretcher. A policeman with a notebook scratched his head and looked from the pool over to an intern who walked around the ambulance, past the fascinated faces of neighbors and then closed the two rear doors.

“Heart attack, Doc?” the policeman asked him. “Is that what you think?”

The intern looked up from his examination papers and nodded. “That’s what it appears.”

The policeman looked over toward the pool again, then up past the crushed garden and overturned patio chairs, to the big, gaping hole in the rear end of the garage where an automobile sat, mute and unrevealing.

“Neighbors said they heard him shouting about something during the night,” the policeman said. “Sounded scared.” He scratched his head again. “Whole Goddamn thing doesn’t make much sense. The busted garage wall, those tire tracks leading to the pool.” He shook his head. “The whole Goddamned thing doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The intern leaned against the ambulance doors, then looked down at the water drops that led to the pool’s edge. “Funny thing,” the intern said softly.

“What is?” asked the policeman.

“A body will float for a while after a drowning.”

“So?” the policeman inquired.

The intern jerked a thumb in the direction of the ambulance. “This one wasn’t floating. It was down at the bottom of the pool just as if it had been weighted or something. But that’s the thing. It hadn’t been weighted. It was just lying there down at the bottom. That’ll happen, you know, after a couple of weeks when the body gets bloated and water logged.” The intern pointed toward the pool. “He hadn’t been there but a few hours.”

“It was his face,” the policeman said with a shudder in his voice. “Did you look closely at his face, Doc? He looked so scared. He looked so God-awful scared. What do you suppose scared him!”

The intern shook his head. “Whatever it was,” he said, “it’s a little item that he’s taken with him!”

He folded the examination papers, went around to the passenger’s seat of the ambulance and opened the door, motioning the driver to move out. The policeman folded up his notebook. He was suddenly conscious of all the neighbors.

“All right, everybody,” he said, putting firmness and authority into his voice, “the show’s over. Come on now...everybody get out of here and go home!”

The crowd slowly dispersed in soft, whispering groups, voices muted by the fascination of death that all men carry with them in small pockets deep inside them. The policeman followed them toward the front yard, running over in his mind the nature of the report he’d have to write and wondering how in God’s name he could submit such an oddball story to the powers that be and have it make any sense. A press photographer was the last man on the scene. He took pictures of the pool, the departing ambulance, a few of the neighbors. He asked a few questions of the latter, jotted them down hurriedly and, as an afterthought, took a picture of the car that was sitting in the garage. Then he got in his own car and drove away.

The following afternoon there was a funeral and only about nine people came because Bartlett Finchley had so few friends. It was a somber but business-like affair with a very brief eulogy and a dry-eyed response. Bartlett Finchley was laid to rest, a lightly lamented minor character, who would be remembered more for his final torment than for his lifelong tartness. The conglomeration of odd and unrelated circumstances surrounding his death—the demolished garage, the destroyed garden, the wrecked patio—were grist for some gossip and conjecture. But they soon palled and were forgotten.

About a year later, the caretaker of the cemetery where Mr. Finchley was interred, a taciturn, grim man, did tell an odd story to his wife one night at the dinner table. He had been using a power mower on the cemetery lawn, and two or three times it had shown a disconcerting tendency to veer off to the right and smash against Bartlett Finchley’s tombstone.

It had elicited little concern on the part of the caretaker and he brought it up only as an additional support for a rather longstanding contention, oft stated to his wife, that those Goddamned power mowers weren’t worth their salt and a good old reliable handmower was really a far better item, albeit slower. And after this briefest of colloquies with his wife, the caretaker had eaten a Brown Betty for dessert, watched television, and gone to bed.

Nothing more was said.

Nothing more needed to be said.

In this corner of the universe, in a shabby, sparsely furnished bedroom inside an aging and decrepit brownstone tenement, stood a prize fighter named Bolie Jackson, staring at himself in the dresser mirror. He weighed a hundred and sixty-three pounds and was an hour and a half away from a comeback at St. Nick’s.

Mr. Bolie Jackson, at thirty-three, was, by the standards of his profession, an aging, over-the-hill relic. At this moment he was looking at the reflection of a man who had left too many pieces of his youth in too many stadiums for too many years before too many screaming people.

He regarded the ebony face, crisscrossed with thin, irregular white scars, and the battered nose that had been smashed this way and that way and finally settled into a shapeless lump, flattened down so that the nostrils were only a fraction of an inch away from an equally scarred upper lip. But, with it all, it was a good face and a gentle face. The eyes were clear, the features expressive, the mouth determined, but not without humor. Nor was the face without character.

In the right-hand corner of the mirror was the reflection of Henry Temple who sat on Bolie Jackson’s bed across the room and stared with undisguised hero worship at the lithe black man who stood in front of him buttoning his shirt. Little Henry Temple, a nine-year-old colored boy, had a personal God named Bolie Jackson and a personal shrine that was this nondescript bedroom on the floor above his own.

Henry looked happily at the fighter’s shoulder muscles, which rippled underneath the shirt. He noted with an adult satisfaction Bolie Jackson’s poise, the way he stood flat-footed, the grace of the man. He was a fighter, a professional fighter, and he was an expert at his craft.

“You feelin’ good, Bolie?” Henry held out his little fists. “Feelin’ sharp? Take a tiger tonight, huh, Bolie?”

Bolie smiled gently at the little boy’s reflection in the mirror. He winked and held out his fists, aping Henry’s gesture. “Take a tiger, Henry,” Bolie announced. “Gonna take me a tiger. Hard left, then a right. One in the stomach and then lift him up by the tail and throw ‘im out to the ninth row.”

Henry’s intent, serious face in the mirror showed a big, even, white-toothed smile. God, but he loved this kid: He watched the boy get up and come over to him.

“You’re lookin’ good, Bolie.” It was a final judgment. It was an absolute, irrevocable analysis from an expert, albeit a nine-year-old worshiper. “You’re lookin’ sharp, Bolie. Oh, boy, you’re lookin’ sharp.”

Bolie’s smile faded as he bent down to look at the little face and then cupped the small chin, pressing it gently. “You gonna watch it on television?”

“You foolin’!” Henry laughed. “I’ll yell so loud you’ll hear me all the way to St. Nick’s.”

They stood and laughed together, then Bolie finished buttoning his shirt. He leaned toward the mirror studying the scars on his face. He touched the biggest one, the ugliest, the one that had taken three months to heal and now stood out in sharp, dead-white, unpleasant relief over the right eyebrow.

“A fighter don’t need a scrapbook, Henry,” Bolie said softly and reflectively “Want to know about what he’s done? Where he’s fought? Read it on his face. He’s got the whole story cut into his flesh.” He tapped the scar over the right eye. “St. Louis, 1949. Guy named Sailor Levitt. Real fast boy. Saw me start to bleed up there that night and it was like it was painted red, white, and blue with a big dot in the center. Never let up off of it. Just kept givin’ it to me in that same spot. I bet that hole was an inch and a half deep by the time he finished.”

He touched the bridge of the battered nose. “That was Memorial Stadium, Syracuse, New York. Italian boy. Fought like Henry Armstrong. All hands and arms, just like a windmill all over you. First time I ever had my nose broken twice in one fight.” He touched the thin scar and the pouched flesh near his ear. “Move south, Henry. Miami, Florida. Boy got me up against a ring post. Did this with his laces.”

Once again he was aware of the little boy’s reflection in the mirror. Henry’s eyes were grim and concerned and it was like a face of a little gnome grown old before his time. Bolie noticed the look, smiled and tried to make his voice lighter.

“On the face, Henry,” he continued. “That’s where you read it. Start in 1947 and then move across. Pittsburgh, Boston, Syracuse...” He touched the scars and then closed his eyes, pressing two fingers against them. His voice was soft and now sounded tired “Old man, Henry Tired old man tryin’ to catch a bus. But the bus already gone. Left a coupla years ago.” He opened his eyes, turned and looked down at the boy “Hands all heavy Legs all rubbery. Breath short. One eye not so good. And there I go, runnin’ down the street tryin’ to catch this bus to glory”

Henry compulsively gripped Bolie’s arm, his voice intense. “Bolie,” Henry said, “you gonna catch a tiger tonight. I’m gonna make a wish. I’m gonna make a big, tall wish. And you ain’t gonna get hurt none either. I’m gonna make a wish you don’t get hurt none. You hear, Bolie? I don’t want you getting’ hurt none. You’ve been hurt enough already. And you’re my friend, Bolie. You’re my good and close friend.”

Bolie stared into the little face and felt an access of tenderness and affection of man for boy that did tight things to his throat. He knelt down in front of Henry and held him by the shoulders, then very gently he kissed him on the cheek, rose, went over to the bed, and took an overnight bag from it.

He left the little boy standing there as he went out the door and down the steps, conscious of the hundreds of nights he’d walked down these steps on his way to this stadium or that stadium. Sometimes to win and come back in a glorious homecoming to back-slapping neighbors. Other times to lose and to sneak skulking back in the dead of night, not wanting to see anyone, hating the pitying look of friends and hating more the accusing looks of people who had bet on him and lost.