The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (69 page)

Heavy breathing sounded on the other side of the door. Whoever was out there was thinking it over very carefully.

“Okay, honey,” the voice finally said. “I never argue with a lady who has a gun.”

Shuffling footsteps started down the stairs and Norma moved quickly to the window, craning her neck so that she could see the front steps below. She waited, but no one came out of the building.

“I don’t think he went down the stairs—” she started to say, and then, hearing the click of a key, she whirled around to see Mrs. Bronson opening the door. “Mrs. Bronson!” she cried. “Wait a min—”

The door was pushed open and a man stood there—a hulking, heavy-featured giant of a man in a torn undershirt, his face and body grimy. Mrs. Bronson screamed and started to rush past him. He caught her by the arm and threw her aside.

Norma held up the gun, clawing at it, trying to find the trigger. The man lashed out, knocking the gun aside, and backhanded her across the face. Norma was stunned by the jolting pain. The man kicked the gun across the floor, then walked over and put his foot on it. He stood there breathing heavily, looking from one to the other.

“Crazy dames! It’s too hot to play games. It’s too damn hot!”

He reached down and picked up the gun, then looked around the room. He saw the refrigerator and went over to it. One bottle of water was left in it and he smiled with relief as he took it out. He threw his head back and drank, the water running out the corners of his mouth and dripping down the front of him. When he had finished the bottle he threw it to one side, where it broke on the floor with incredible loudness.

He walked slowly across the room, still holding the gun, and looked at the pictures, studying them carefully. He looked at Norma and pointed to one of the paintings. “You do this?” he asked.

Norma nodded, not daring to speak.

“You’re good,” the man said. “You paint real good. My wife used to paint.”

The terror overflowed from Mrs. Bronson. “Please,” she moaned, “please leave us alone. We didn’t do you any harm. Please—”

The man just stared at her as if her voice came from far away. He turned, looked at the painting again and then down at the gun, as if he had suddenly become aware of it. Very slowly he lowered it until it hung loosely from his hand and then he dropped to the floor. His mouth twitched and his eyes kept blinking. He went over to the couch and sat down.

“My wife,” he said, “my wife was having her baby. She was in the hospital. Then this”—he motioned toward the window “this thing happened. She was... she was so fragile—just a little thing.” He held out his hands again as if groping for the right words. “She couldn’t take the heat. They tried to keep her cool but... but she couldn’t take the heat. The baby didn’t live more than an hour and then... then she followed him.” His head went down, and when he looked up again his eyes were wet “I’m not a—I’m not a housebreaker. I’m a decent man. I swear to you, I’m a decent man. It’s just that...well, this heat. This terrible heat. And all morning long I’ve been walking around the streets trying to find some water.”

His eyes pleaded for understanding; and underneath the dirty sweat, his face suddenly looked young and frightened. “I didn’t mean to do you any harm, honest. I wouldn’t hurt you. Would you believe it?” He laughed. “I was scared of
you
. That’s right—I was just as scared of you as you were of me.”

He rose from the couch and started across the room, his foot hitting a fragment of the broken glass from the bottle. He looked down at it. “I’m...I’m sorry about that,” he said.”I’m just off my rocker. I was just so thirsty.” He moved toward the door past Mrs. Bronson. He held out a hand to her. It was a gesture that was almost—supplication. “Please...please forgive me, will you? Will you please forgive me?”

He went to the door and leaned against the frame for a moment, the sweat pouring down his face. “Why doesn’t it end?” he said in a low voice, almost unintelligible. “Why don’t we just...why don’t we just burn up?” He turned to them. “I wish it would end. That’s all that’s left now—just to have it end.” He went out.

When Norma heard the front door close, she went over to Mrs. Bronson, helped her to her feet, and cradled her head in her arms, petting her like a mother.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. “Mrs. Bronson, listen to me, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

She went across the room and pulled out a canvas from a group of others. She turned it around and held it in front of her. It was a hurriedly done waterfall scene, obviously rough work and painted with desperation.

Mrs. Bronson looked at it for a long moment and slowly smiled. “It’s beautiful, Norma. I’ve seen waterfalls like that. There’s one near Ithaca, New York. It’s the highest waterfall in this part of the country, and I love the sound of it.” She went over to the canvas and touched it. “That clear water tumbling over the rocks—that wonderful clear water.”

Suddenly she stopped and looked up, her eyes wide. “Did you hear it?” she asked.

Norma stared at her.

“Don’t you hear it, Norma? Oh, it’s a wonderful sound. It’s so... it’s so cool. It’s so clear.” She kept listening as she walked across the room to the window. “Oh, Norma,” she said, her smile now a vapid, dreamy thing, “it’s lovely. It’s just lovely. Why, we could take a swim right now.”

“Mrs. Bronson...” Norma said in a choked voice.

“Let’s take a swim, Norma, at the bottom of the waterfall. I used to do that when I was a girl. Just sit there and let the water come down on you. Oh, the lovely water,” she murmured, as she leaned her face against the burning-hot glass. “Oh, the beautiful water... the cool nice water...the lovely water.”

The white-hot rays of the sun clawed at her face, and slowly she began to slump to the floor, leaving a patch of burnt flesh on the window, and then she crumpled in a heap silently. Norma bent down over her. “Mrs. Bronson?” she said. “Mrs. Bronson?” Norma began to cry. “Oh, Mrs. Bronson...”

It happened rather quickly after that. The windows of the buildings began to crack and shatter. The sun was now the whole sky—a vast flaming ceiling that pressed down inexorably.

Norma had tried to pick up the gun but the handle was too hot to touch. Now she knelt in the middle of the room and watched as the paint began to run down the canvases, slow rivulets of thick sluggish color like diminutive lava streams; after a moment, they burst into flames that licked up the canvases, in jagged, hungry assaults.

Norma didn’t feel the pain when it finally came. She was not aware that her slip had caught fire or that liquid was running out from her eyes. She was a lifeless thing in the middle of an inferno, and there was nothing left inside her throat or mind to allow the scream to come out—

Then the building exploded and the massive sun devoured the entire city.

It was black and cold, and an icy frost lay thick on the corners of the window. A doctor with thin lips, his overcoat collar turned high, sat alongside the bed and reached over to touch Norma’s forehead. He turned to look across the room at Mrs. Bronson, who stood by the door.

“She’s coming out of it now,” he said quietly. Then he turned back toward the bed. “Miss Smith?” There was a pause. “Miss Smith?” Norma opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Yes,” she whispered.

“You’ve been running a very high fever, but I think it’s broken now.”

“Fever?”

Mrs. Bronson moved to the bed. “You gave us a start, child—you’ve been so ill. But you’re going to be all right now.” She smiled hopefully at the doctor. “Isn’t she, doctor? Isn’t she going to be all right?”

The doctor didn’t smile back. “Of course,” he said quietly. Then he rose and motioned to Mrs. Bronson. He tucked the blankets tighter around the girl, picked up his bag, and moved out into the hall where Mrs. Bronson was waiting for him.

A cold air whistled up through the landing and through the window over the stairway snow came down in heavy ice-laden gusts.

“I hope she’ll be all right,” the doctor said to Mrs. Bronson. ‘‘Just let her sleep as much as she can.” He looked down at his bag. “I wish I had something left to give her,” he said disconsolately, “but the medicine’s pretty much all gone now.” He looked toward the window over the landing. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to come back. I’m going to try to move my family south tomorrow. A friend of mine has a private plane.”

Mrs. Bronson’s voice was quiet and sad. “They say... they say on the radio that Miami is a little warmer.”

The doctor just looked at her. “So they say.” Then he stared at the ice-encrusted window. “But we’re just prolonging it. That’s all we’re doing. Everybody running like scared rabbits to the south, and they say that within a week that’ll be covered with snow, too.”

Through the partially opened door to Mrs. Bronson’s apartment a radio announcer’s voice could be heard. “This is a traffic advisory,” the voice said, “from the Office of Civil Defense. Motorists are advised to stay off the highways on all those routes leading south and west out of New York City. We repeat this advisory:
Stay off the highways
.”

The doctor picked up his bag and started toward the steps. “There was a scientist on this morning,” Mrs. Bronson said as she walked beside him. “He was trying to explain what happened. How the earth had changed its orbit and started to move away from the sun. He said that...” Her voice became strained. “He said that within a week or two—three at the most—there wouldn’t be any more sun—that we’d all...” She gripped her hands together. ‘
We’d all freeze
.”

The doctor tried to smile at her, but nothing showed on his face. He looked haggard and old and his lips were blue as he tightened the scarf around his neck, put on a pair of heavy gloves, and started down the steps.

Mrs. Bronson watched him for a moment until he disappeared around the corner of the landing, then she returned to Norma’s room. “I had such a terrible dream,” Norma said, her eyes half closed. “Such an awful dream, Mrs. Bronson.”

The older woman pulled a chair up closer to the bed.

“There was daylight all the time. There was a...a midnight sun and there wasn’t any night at all. No night at all.” Her eyes were fully open now and she smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful, Mrs. Bronson, to have darkness and coolness?”

Mrs. Bronson stared into the feverish face and nodded slowly. “Yes, my dear,” she said softly, “it’s wonderful.”

Outside the snow fell heavier and heavier and the glass on the thermometer cracked. The mercury had gone down to the very bottom, and there was no place left for it to go. And very slowly night and cold reached out with frozen fingers to feel the pulse of the city, and then to stop it.

The Rip Van Winkle Caper

The tracks of the Union Pacific were reptile twins snaking their way south of the Nevada line into the vast torrid valleys of the Mojave desert. And once a day when the crack streamliner, City of St. Louis, thundered along these tracks past the needle-like volcanic crags, the distant saw-toothed desolate mountains, the dead sea of ash and brittle creosote brush, it was the intrusion of a strange anachronism. The screaming power of the diesel pushed aside the desert winds. It shot past the white and arid wastes of the ancient land as if afraid of being caught by the jagged, crumbling spurs of rock that surrounded the great quadrangular desert.

And once ...just once...the impossible happened. The steel cord that tied the train to the earth was parted. Too late, the giant wheels sent up protesting sparks and agonized metal shrieks, trying to stop that which could not be stopped—fifty tons of engine and train moving at ninety miles an hour. It thundered off the broken tracks and smashed against a sloping sand dune with an explosive roar that shattered that still desert with earth-shaking reverberation. Cars followed the engine off the tracks like nightmares piling atop nightmares until the carnage had spent itself. The City of St. Louis was a dying metal beast with fifteen broken vertebrae stretched across the desert floor.

The moving van lumbered up the side of the desert slope toward the lonely ledge above. It groaned and wheezed in the heat, while behind it a small sedan followed closely. When it reached the ledge the van pulled to the left and let the sedan go by, stopping a few hundred feet away. Then the van reversed until it had backed against the opening of a cave—a yawning mouth in the face of the rock. Two men got out of the van and two out of the sedan. They wore unmarked white coveralls, and all four met near the tailgate of the van. They were like a committee of quiet generals meeting for a critique after a giant battle-sweaty, dead-tired, but victorious.