3NN3A3HD DISPLAY UNTIL MAY 22 asa id 9nix mi DOT 1?S1 3D1M lii361V 090 3*407 UCGN> I T T 3Db7 CO 78 OOM NOT 22 RETURN OF THE ZONE: PART 5 by J. Michael Straczynski The final chapter of our series on the new Twilight Zone TV show. Beaumont Lives! A Special Tribute 48 REMEMBERING CHARLES BEAUMONT by Roger Anker A look back at one of The Twilight’s Zone’s most brilliant writers. 54 YOUR THREE MINUTES ARE UP by George Clayton Johnson A long-distance call from an old friend. 66 ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY: PART 11 by Kathryn Drennan and J. Michael Straczynski Our continuing guide to Serlings second fantasy series. 79 TZ TELEPLAY: NOTHING IN THE DARK by George Clayton Johnson Page 42 6 IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE 8 EDITOR'S NOTE 10 LETTERS 12 BOOKS by Ed Bryant 16 SCREEN by Gahan Wilson 41 TZ QUIZ 88 TZ SCREENING ROOM 18 THE MIND'S EAR by Jillian Smith and Margaret Mayo McGlynn A special report on the audio fiction experience. Cover art by Gottfried Helnweinn Rod Selling's Twilight Zone Magazine (Issn # 0279-6090) June, 1989, Volume 9, Number 2, is published bimonthly (February, p'kW ' 9? ober - December) in the United States and simultaneously in Canada by TZ Publications, a division of Toso'ht T 7 p b m hln 5 Cor D 01 j c 0 ",'. 40 ? ^ Atom* South, New York, NY. 10016-8802. Telephone (212) 779-8900. Copyright c 1989 by TZ Publications. Rod Serlings The Twilight Zone Magazine is published pursuant to a license from Carol Serling and V a ^ tnte , rpnS f S ' a < 7z Vls,0n ° f V,acom International, Inc All rights reserved. Second-class postage paid at New York, N Y and at additional mailing offices. Return postage must accompany all unsolicited material. The publisher assumes no responsibility AH °i F’sohci ted materials. All rights reserved on material accepted for publication unless otherwise specified. sei \ t . to Rod Serlings The Twilight Zone Magazine or to its editors are assumed intended for publication. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. Any similarity between persons appearing in fiction and real persons living or dead is coincidental. Single copies $2.50 in U.S., U.S. military bases, and U.S. possessions, $3 00 elsewhere. Subscriptions: U.S.. U.S. militarv. and IIS nr*cc*»cci™>c Sit; <;n. da an ah i u ue "V c u ,,v 1S , coincidental. Single copies *2.50 in U.S., U.S. military bases, and U.S. possessions, $3. elsewhere Subscriptions: U.S.. U.S. military, and U.S. possessions, $15.50; $18.50 elsewhere. All orders must be paid in U currency. Member, Audtt Bureau of CirculaHons. Postmaster: Send address changes to Rod Setting's The Twilight Zone Magazi, P.O. Box 252, Mt. Morns, IL 61054-0252. Printed in the U.S.A. 5 Page 79 JUST ANOTHER PERFECT DAY by John Varley What if today were really the first day of your life? TZ FIRST: MAGGIE by Dan Bennett Only she knew the secret of the perfect gift. TZ FIRST: SPUDS by Terry Runte His side dish refused to stay on the sidelines. THE CARNIVAL by Charles Beaumont A carnival's magic may sometimes turn dark and strange. TIMED EXPOSURE by Richard Christian Matheson The camera's eye can reveal more than one wants to see. EXODUS: 22:18 by Nancy Baker He'd vowed to destroy the Queen of Darkness. 26 34 38 42 58 62 IT ♦ " IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE Television Land ome evenings, when we're working late on the magazine, we get a weird feeling that if we turned around quickly enough, the walls would peel back to reveal a television crew set up behind us. At times, it seems as if we're trapped inside a TV program. We're not sure if it's a comedy or a drama, but all the elements are here: Tension and excitement, tragedy mixed with broad farce, the usual cast of eccentric characters .... If you think about it, we're not the only people who look at the world this way —everyone does. Look around you. TV is our frame of reference; our com- mon language. Though we may not want to admit it, television - with all its faults — is the most important art form of this century. So come with us as we pay tribute to that art form; past, present, and fu- ture. Our first presentation on the "TZ Network" is a special feature on one of the most influential fantasy writers of our time -Charles Beaumont, a brilliant and prolific screenwriter who was second only to Rod Serling in his contribu- tions to The Twilight Zone. We begin with a recently rediscovered Beaumont tale, "The Carnival," one of several previously unpublished stories in a new col- lection, Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories (Dark Harvest Press), edited by Roger Anker. In his essay, "Remembering Charles Beaumont," Anker gives us an intimate look back at this remarkable writer through the eyes of those who knew him best. One of the central members of Beaumont's circle, George Clayton Johnson, contributes an intriguing meditation on his association with Beaumont in "Your Three Minutes Are Up." Co-author of Logan's Run with William F. Nolan, and a screenwriter on Twilight Zone— The Movie, Johnson wrote several of The Twilight Zone's most memorable episodes, including this issue's TZ Teleplay, "Nothing in the Dark." (That's young George Clayton Johnson with Robert Red- ford in the photo on the contents page, by the way!) As evidence that the creative fire of fantasy is still alive and well in Televi- sion Land, Kathryn M. Drennan and J. Michael Straczynski continue their se- ries on Rod Seriing's Night Gallery; and Straczynski offers his final chapter in the stranger-than-fiction saga of the making of the new syndicated Twilight Zone (aka TZ3") in Return of the Zone. And, as proof that there's more to fan- tasy than meets the eyes, Jillian Smith and Margaret Mayo McGlynn give us their personal impressions of that very old and very new medium, audio fic- tion, in a special section called "The Mind's Ear." We also present several fictional "mind-plays" this issue, beginning with Just Another Perfect Day"; a compelling tale about the nature of memory and love, by John Varley, award-winning author of the Gaea Trilogy. We've also got a chiller from Richard Christian Matheson entitled "Timed Exposure," as well as two TZ Firsts: "Maggie," by Dan Bennett (a graduate of the Clarion Writing Workshop), is a bittersweet tale of simple magic. "Spuds," by Terry Runte, is a wonky look at the world of talking tubers. Runte has published a lot of hu- morous nonfiction, but this is his first fiction sale. And finally, Nancy Baker, whose story, "The Party Over There" (April '88), was one of our earliest TZ Firsts, rejoins us with "Exodus 22:18," a nasty little trip into the mind of a maniac With that, it's time we got back to work here in the TZ soundstage. But dont go away. We'll be right back after this brief commercial message. . . John Varley 6 TWILIGHT ZONE PHOTO BY RICIA MAINHARnT EDITOR’S NOTES Synergy CORPORATE President and Publisher S. Edward Orenstein Executive Vice Presidents, Corporate Brian D. Orenstein Russell T. Orenstein Associate Publisher and Consulting Editor Carol Serling EDITORIAL Editorial Director, Corporate Marc Lichter Editor-in-Chief Tappan King Managing Editor Peter R. Emshwiller Assistant Editor Margaret Mayo McGlynn Reader Rich Friedman Contributing Editors Gahan Wilson • James Verniere Edward Bryant J. Michael Straczynski Kathryn M. Drennan ART Design Director, Corporate Michael Monte Art Director Tom Waters Art Production Mark VanTine PRODUCTION Vice President, Production Stephen J. Fallon Typesetting Irma Lance • Ron Stark ADMINISTRATION AND FINANCE Vice President, Treasurer Chris Grossman Accounting Manager Saul Steinhaus Accounting Assistants Asnar Angeles • Evelyn Cruz John Ubanwa Office Manager Margaret Inzana Office Assistant Gina Cruz Traffic Oniel Pagan Traffic Assistant Gloria Cruz ADVERTISING Advertising Production Manager Theresa Martorano Advertising Assistant Belinda Davila CIRCULATION / PROMOTION Vice President, Sales and Operations Michael Dillon Subscription Manager Dean Lage Promotion Manager Cecelia Giunta Promotion Assistant Suzie Goodman Direct Sales Manager Judy Linden A.rt Designer Gregory Lawrence Stewart ast Halloween, I found myself in the middle of a debate between two of Britain's most terrifying writers. When I say "in the middle," I mean it literally. I was part of a panel discussion at the World Fantasy Con- vention in London about the differences between working in print and in film. On my right sat James Herbert, Britain's most successful horror writer, whose novel. The Enchanted Cottage, is currently being adapted for film. On my left was Clive Barker, the phenomenally popular author of The Books of Blood, who directed Hellraiser and produced its sequel. "I myself would never work in film," Herbert was saying. "It would be too frustrating. When I'm writing a novel, I have complete control over how every- thing turns out. Once it gets into the hands of filmmakers, it invariably changes into something different. That's why I never let others adapt my novels for film unless I'm reasonably sure they're going to do things my way." Barker had a different point of view: "I enjoy filmmaking. It's a different experience entirely from writing prose. It's rather fun, actually, so long as you go into it with the understanding that you're part of a team, and you can't do it all yourself. You have to surrender yourself to the process, but if you do, you can get amazing things done. Besides, if you've got fantastically talented people working with you, you'd be a fool not to make use of those talents." There's a lot to be said for James Herbert's fiercely independent stance. It's important to have faith in your own vision, and to be willing to act on that vision, no matter what anyone says — especially if you choose to devote your- self to a creative profession such as writing. And it's very satisfying to be pro- ducer, director, cast and crew of your own mind-movie, with a multi-million dollar special-effects budget you can put to use at the turn of a phrase. But there's a kind of magic that only happens when people work together. Collaboration kindles a kind of synergy that can result in something truly origi- nal. That's why writers like Clive Barker, who have achieved a great deal of success in print, are drawn to an inherently collaborative art form like film. Even if you know your work may be altered to suit a casting or location change, a director's wishes, or even an accountant's budget, it can be a genuine pleasure to be part of a group of creative minds, working together to achieve a common vision. There's a persistent myth that writing is the most solitary of activities. But that's not entirely true. One of the "trade secrets" of many successful writers is that they make a point of interacting with others, some by collaborating on projects with other writers, others by "workshopping" their writing with friends, family members, fellow writers, or a sympathetic editor. It's not just the enthusiasm and positive reinforcement that makes sharing your work with others worthwhile; it's what that give and take brings to the work itself. The heart of the writing process, or any artistic endeavor, lies in commu- nicating your own experiences as vividly and honestly as possible with others, so they can feel what you feel. The more friends you have around you to feed that experience with their own, the more believable your own work will be. And the more you understand how others think and feel, the more likely you are to touch another person's heart with your words. Tappan King Editor-in-Chief 8 TWILIGHT ZONE LETTERS □ ACK IN 1985, 1 WAS GIVEN AN ISSUE of Twilight Zone Magazine as a present when I was laid up in a hospital after an operation. It was given to me since I'd always liked the series. I found your magazine had stories that were ideally suited for the short bursts of strength I had during my recovery. I loved the magazine, and soon took out my own subscription so I wouldn't miss an issue. Since then, I have read every issue from cover to cover. (My favorite story was "Dreams of Drowning," by Wells Lord Hough. I hope to see more of his worl* in your magazine.) Keep up the good work. Susan M. Skibba Milwaukee, WI I HAVE BEEN READING TWILIGHT ZONE FOR so long, I can't remember when I started. It is my favorite magazine, and the only one I've continued subscribing to since I went back to school for a "mid-life career change." You've run many wonderful stories that have continued to haunt me months — even years— after I've read them. I also love your book reviews, and I find your excerpts from novels just fantastic (I couldn't wait for Swan Song to come out after reading your preview.) The stories I care for least are the traditional ones where I know the pro- tagonist is going to endure some ter- rible fate in the end. But, by and large, I'm hooked. Keep 'em coming! Nancy Preston Lynwood, CA I THOUGHT I'D WRITE YOU A LETTER AND tell you what I felt about your maga- zine. First, I'll start with what I did like. I love the TZ scripts. They are very in- teresting, and I try to watch for the ones I've read to come on television; it's neat to see how they are done. I also love the non-fiction features you have. The film previews and articles on strange phenomena are consistently refreshing. The fantasy fiction stories are also a favorite of mine. But here comes the problem. The bulk of your fiction seems to be horror. I prefer the TZ "fantasy" stories that make you think— the ones that express an interesting idea — far more than the horror stories where some innocent victim suffers. I also never know whether a story will be horror or fantasy (maybe you could put them in different sections?). Karen Boyer Sterling, MA Thank you for resuming publication of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone teleplays in the magazine. I let my subscription lapse for a while, but now have renewed it. Serling's work helped fire and shape my imagination when I was grow- ing up — I suspect the same is true for a lot of us in our mid-forties — and I've been very pleased to see my children enjoying the Twilight Zone rebroadcasts. Thank you again for bring this original work back to life. Corey Phelps Des Moines, IA A WELL-INTENTIONED FRIEND OF MINE ASKED me the other day what TZ has that makes me buy it so faithfully. First, let me tell you what you don't have. You don't have the most information on the latest sci-fi megaturkeys. To be honest, the movie mags do that better, especial- ly since you dropped your color sec- tion. (Bring it back!) You don't have the goriest pictures. You don't even have the most short stories. (Other maga- zines give you more words of fiction for your dollar.) But the stories you do have get to me in ways others don't. ("Wolf Trap- ping" in the latest issue literally kept me up all night!) More important, you take my favorite kind of entertainment more seriously than anybody else does. Here's what I mean: Each time I finish an issue, I feel like I've had a great party with a bunch of really strange people who like me, and want to talk about things that they liked (or hated— that's just as good) with me. You guys really think about what you put into each issue (unlike some brain- dead publications I could name.) If I had one complaint (or request, rather), it would be that you do less about more things. I'd like your opinions on everything that's going on in fantasy and horror these days — movies, artwork, games, conventions. I'd also like to see short articles on the different kinds of fantasy out there. (It's easy to get lost.) But I guess that would take twice as many pages, and I can barely afford to buy each issue as it is! Never mind. Anyway, thanks for giving me something to look forward to. (Loved the "Drowning Man" cover, by the way!) Megan Cooper Lakeland, LA To MANY OF US WHO GREW UP WATCHING The Twilight Zone, and continue to watch it in endless reruns. Rod Serling has become something of a mythical figure. In "Return of the Zone" (Feb 89), J. Michael Straczynski casually drops the names of two "lost" Twilight Zone outlines by Rod Serling that will not be produced for the current series. Just reading the titles, "The Theatre" and "Osgood and the Warlock," is enough to make a Serling fan's mouth water, and mind wonder. Some of the new episodes have been disappointing, but overall TZ3 looks promising. ("The Hellgrammite Method" would have made a great Night Gallery ). Mr. Straczynski's "in- sider's view" has made watching the show a much more enjoyable experi- ence for me. Timothy M. Walters Muskogee, OK We welcome letters on any subject of interest to our readers. All letters must contain your name and address and are assumed to be intended for publication, unless you request otherwise. Letters submitted become the property of the Publisher, and we reserve the right to edit them for length or suitability. Send let- ters to TZ LETTERS DEPARTMENT, 401 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8802. 10 TWILIGHT ZONE BOOKS EDWARD BRYANT New Wave Horror, New Age Fiction— and Beyond □ live Barker is the very image of the sort of fellow who many writers would love to become. Aside from being young and British, he's a very successful novelist, short-story writer, graphic artist, play- wright, and film director with a global following. Articulate, intelligent, and witty, he also takes great bookjacket photographs. While he's perhaps best known (or perhaps most notorious) for the super- charged energy level and immoderate voice of his prose. Barker loves to inject gallows humor into his fiction. However grim the events of a given story, the au- thor defends his word-plays and manic images: "It's a very British way to look at the surface of literature. Look at practically any of the Jacobeans or the Elizabethan playwrights. The surface works. It's lively with all that kind of material. I think what it signals to the reader is: I care enough about the sur- face of this fiction to give you many kinds of pleasures." Below the Surface Some of those pleasures are terrible puns. In the title short novel of his new collection Cabal (Poseidon Press, $18.95, 377 pp„ ISBN 0-671-62688-4), a rather endearing character who hap- pens to be an undead ghoul is, at one point, disemboweled by the serial-killer villain of the piece. The dead man stands there, watching his guts spill out on the ground. "Help me," he cries out, "I'm coming undone." Perhaps that sort of thigh-slapping humor is not to every reader's taste, but to many of us it's a welcome note of grace in an otherwise violent, horrific scene. After his grim first novel. The Dam- nation Game, Barker claims that its successors, Weaveworld and Cabal, are meant to be optimistic and healing. Cabal does not, on the surface, seem that fruitful a vehicle for constructive optimism. It's about a psychiatric patient named Boone who is manipulated by his doc- tor into thinking that he (Boone) is completely looney tunes — is, in fact, a serial killer. Fleeing the malign shrink's setup, Boone seeks sanctuary in a vast necropolis located in a deserted town somewhere in northern Alberta. There he encounters the Nightbreed, a collec- tion of flesh-eating ghouls (though nice folks otherwise) living beneath the cemetery. One of them says, "Being dead isn't bad. It isn't even that differ- ent. It's just. . .unexpected." The unlucky protagonist ends up dead and reborn into monsterdom, as all the while his mortal lover continues attempting to recover him. The subter- ranean monsters find themselves menaced by a human monster far more malevo- lent than anything lurking in a cob- webbed tomb. The novel has its com- plement of violence, not to mention a genuinely askew sex/love scene, which the author says spins off of "a sort of S&M Christianity." And yes, there's a happy ending .... The novel does end up both healing and optimistic Granting certain condi- tions . . . Barker says there will be two more short novels in this series. Addi- tionally, he'll be writing and directing a big-screen production of Cabal for Morgan Creek Productions, the folks who brought you David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. One of Barker's accomplishments in Cabal is to explore offbeat notions of death. He has a great intellectual inter- est in death, be it collecting famous last words (Oscar Wilde on his deathbed looking up at the wallpaper and saying, "Either the wallpaper goes or I go."), or admiring the visionary paintings of Stanley Spencer in the Tate. He recog- nizes the importance of the concept of death as something that can be explored through horror fiction. Just as Stephen King defines such vicarious experiences as roller-coaster rides and reading hor- ror novels, in Cabal, Barker rehearses us for death. While some of the heedless, head- 12 TWILIGHT ZONE long pacing of early Barker is missing in Cabal, the novel profits from an in- creased and much more fluid maturity. Cabal is actually a mutated and much-augmented American version of the sixth and final volume of Barker's seminal work. The Books of Blood. The eponymous short novel is brand- new. The final framing vignette from the original edition has been dropped (it now appears in the handsome hard- back Putnam omnibus of the first three volumes, titled The Books of Blood). The four longer pieces of fiction from volume six have been retained. "The Life of Death," "How Spoilers Bleed," and "Twilight at the Towers" are here, along with the novella, "The Last Illusion." "The Last Illusion" is a marvelous piece about tough detective Harry d'Amour's run-in with the supernatural. It's the best chunk of hardboiled occult fiction since William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel. All in all. Cabal is a remarkably satisfying book; certainly one of the best horror collections of the year. Jack in the Box Here's another fascinating collection. It's not marketed or packaged as a col- lection. No one concerned would ever admit it's a collection. Let's just avoid strife and refer to it as a "novel." Sort of a novel. Whatever it is. Dead Lines (Ban- tam, $3.95, 309 pp„ ISBN 0-553- 27633-6) is certainly the tightest and best-written of the five collaborative books thus far published by John Skipp and Craig Spector. Dead Lines concerns Jack Rowan, a nightmarish twit of a New York writer, all twisted ego and jerk-off sensibilities. Jack hangs himself in his best friend's loft; then deeply regrets his impetuous act. He wants to come back. A lot, In the meantime, the loft has been rented by Meryl and Katie, two tough, vulnerable, with-it Man- hattan young women. Katie once was Jack's lover, but doesn't know her new abode is where he offed himself. Meryl finds and reads a secret stash box filled with manuscripts— Jack's unpublished stories. We get to read the stories, too. Thus the aspect of Dead Lines that cleverly makes it a collection. Tenant rights in Midtown not being everything they could be. Jack gets the opportuni- ty to attempt a little repossession — of Katie's body. Jack Rowan isn't all that bad a writer. A number of his stories have been published separately under the Skipp and Spector bylines, jointly and separately. Clearly Harlan Ellison is at least one of Rowan's important influ- ences. The quality of Rowan's prose ranges from so-so to pretty damned good. For example, "Gentlemen" (from The Architecture of Fear) is a flat-out fine story. Where Skipp and Spector fall short of writing an unreserved tour de force is in the integration (or lack thereof) of Jack Rowan's fiction and the lives of the characters. Some of the stories within the greater story don't seem to have any great reason for being there, other than to bulk out the central conceit. Skipp and Spector needed to play more with the blurring of fantasy and reality, life and fiction, fabrication and truth, paying more attention to all the ragged areas where people's internal stories are seamless with their external existences. But, in any case, it's good to see the graph of the Skipp and Spector 's career continue to climb at escape velocity. New Age Fiction Like a blind, snuffling predator, the great New York publishing beast senses that there's a vast untapped consumer market out there for an enormous spec- trum of books that can somehow be tagged''New Age." No one’s quite sure what belongs on the New Age aisle in Waldenbooks or B. Dalton's, but there's money to be made regardless. Nonfic- tion's been one kettle of eels. Fiction is another. Do New Age people read fic- tion other than Jacob Atabet, Olaf Stapledon, and Walden 111 Yes, proba- bly. For years now, there have been signs that various trade publishers would start up slickly packaged lines of New Age fiction. So far, it hasn't happened. It will. The marketplace will dictate it. But the publishers paradoxically have been resisting mightily. They just seem very unsure of how to sell novels that drop the fantasy label, yet still deal with communication with alien and/or dead entities, dolphin wisdom, crystals of power, revelations from Atlantis, and personal transformation to the nth power. According to a highly placed source at Simon & Schuster, Pocket Books al- most inaugurated a New Age fiction line late last year. The debut offering was to be a first novel by Devin O'Branagan called Spirit Warriors ($4.50, 360 pp., ISBN 0-671-66774-2). The book appeared, but was labeled horror. A failure of nerve, apparently. The sales force wasn't quite sure what New Age fiction was, and how it could be sold in Dubuque. “Jeter's writing is impressive, intense, vivid, and unflinch- ingly honest.” -RAMSEY CAMPBELL “IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD is so powerful, it’s numbing. Jeter’s prose is lean as a scalpel and cuts to the bone.” -J0ELANSDALE IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD By K.W. Jeter $3 95 @ ONYX TWILIGHT ZONE 13 ft BOOKS And, indeed. I'm not sure I can de- fine it, either. It would be too easy to toss off New Age fiction as simply the same old wine in new plastic cartons. It's tempting to pick on the vocabulary. (Before an operation, one character says to another in Spirit Warriors, "Can you leave your body, or do you want seda- tion?") But that's not all of it, by any means. What I take New Age work to be attempting, by and large, is an in- tegration of omni-cultural systems of metaphysics, along with an emphasis on personal, often radical, transforma- tion. New Age thought seems to be very open. Also very credulous. Spirit Warriors starts in 1962 with both the Antichrist and the Daughter of God being reborn into the world at the proper conjunction of planets. An age- old play has begun again. We meet other players who must make up their own minds about which side they'll support: Fay, the Gypsy psychic; Neva, the Native American medicine woman; Eric, the self-sufficient Vietnam vet. As a novice effort, the novel's pret- ty good, though it rapidly becomes ap- parent that the writer's bitten off about three thousand pages worth of material and tried to compress it into a space one tenth that. All the necessary writer's skills are in abundant evidence, al- though not yet fully tuned and polished. Author O'Branagan gets a ten for ambi- tion, perhaps a six or seven for execution. As with so many other contemporary fantasists, she has trouble striking the proper balance of focus with her rotat- ing cast of characters. Part of Stephen King's magic is his ability to set down just the right qualities and precise detail that will satisfactorily sketch the por- trait of a character with economy. Most of his competition either includes too much or too little — or simply the wrong details altogether. With O'Branagan, there are wonder- ful backgrounds, particularly with her Native American characters. All the de- tail of ritual and ceremony ring very true. The plot -well, it's as tested and true as the cast-engine block in a 1964 Rambler. The level of writing is good, every once in a while breaking into the kind of evocative prose that communi- cates far more than what the bare words actually say on the printed page. My qualm? That matter of focus again. I felt far too infrequently that 1 was actually walking inside the skins of the characters. Distance. Perhaps that's the key. So many characters, so many plotlines. It was hard to close the dis- tance between printed page and human heart. Yet .... And yet. Unlike most other books I read. Spirit Warriors insinuat- ed itself into my dreams after I finished the final chapters. That probably says something. At the very least, it says that I'll go out of my way to give Devin O'Branagan's second novel a try. Son of Slob The indefatigable Rex Miller has pub- lished his second novel, a follow-up to last year's Slob. The new one's called Frenzy (Onyx, $3.95, 302 pp., ISBN 0- 451-40105-0). It's another Jack Eichord novel, at least nominally about a disaf- fected Chicago homicide detective. But just as Slob focused on its eponymous five-hundred pound maniacal serial killer, so Frenzy centers on another psy- chopath. Frank Spain is the St. Louis mob's chief hitman. Unfortunately, be- ing on the road all the time takes a toll on Spain's homelife. His wife runs off with another man; his alienated teenage daughter takes up with a sleazoid punk. The boyfriend then inducts the girl into the mysteries of sex, drugs, prostitu- tion, and — ultimately— a downward spi- ral of degradation that ends when the girl stars in a Mexican snuff movie. Eventually, her father finds all this out and compiles a list of everyone respon- sible. He is not happy. The psycho with a career is now a psycho with a cru- sade. Spain finds out that the ultimate evil behind his daughter's death is the very Mafia family he works for. A true gonzo berserker, he starts slicing, dicing, chopping, and flaying through the long list of those who laid one perverted, sadistic finger on his beloved only child. The detective. Jack Eichord, comes into the case when he's investigating some of Spain's "professional" depreda- tions. But he ultimately has even less to do in this novel than in Slob. Clearly, the focus of auctorial interest is on the maniac with a mission. Frenzy is not a particularly affecting fantasy of revenge. Nothing Shakespear- ian here. The novel is more a whipped confection with a metallic, somewhat bitter undertaste. Imagine a mutant eclair with razor blades and rusty nails inserted into the cream filling. One thing Miller's novels have done is to create considerable speculation about their authorship. That the style of each book careens wildly among points of view, tense changes, and tonal sea changes has led to speculation that Rex Miller is either a very strange dude — or he's a pseudonym for a whole group of writers. For a while there was reason for me to believe "Miller" was a literary committee, much like the News- day staff who jointly concocted Naked Came the Stranger by "Penelope Ashe." Now I know I was wrong, but it was a great story while it lasted. I had a wonderfully esoteric liter- ary theory precariously balanced on the observation that Frenzy's plot and entire sensibility contain striking paral- lels to Barry Malzberg's old Lone Wolf series, written as Mike Barry. Could it be that Malzberg was yet another po- tential lobe of Rex Miller's brain? Nope, as it turned out. And you all will have at least another three Jack Eichord adventures to look forward to, including a visit from an old friend. Then, somewhere in Miller's publishing schedule, there will be a killer of a seri- ous Vietnam novel called The Profane Men. So stay tuned. 14 TWILIGHT ZONE Short Takes It's time to support your local Lansdale again. In return. Uncle Joe will tell you a bedtime story to curdle your spinal fluid. New is Cold in July (Bantam, $3.50, 208 pp., ISBN 0-553-28020-1) by Joe R. Lansdale. You'll probably find this one stashed over in the mystery/ suspense section. It's about a nice guy with a wife and young son who, one night after shooting an intruder, is plunged into nightmare. Reality keeps flip-flopping like a winter flu virus mutating. The novel's a kicker about parental responsibility, in which females possess the only sensible moral com- pass. But that doesn't stop boys from doin' what boys gotta do. Spare and uncompromising. Cold in July echoes all sorts of tall, rangy writers of the Forties and Fifties, but still ends up. its own thing. Joe Bob, er, Ed says, "Check it out." There's a tough new kid in town, and when he — and sometimes it's she — talks, you'd better listen. What I'm making reference to is Pulphouse (Pulp- house Publishing, Box 1227, Eugene, OR 97440, $17.95, 267 pp.) edited by Kristine Rusch and published by Dean Wesley Smith. Pulphouse is nominally a quar- terly periodical; in fact, it refers to it- self as "the hardback magazine." But when something howls like a jaguar, pads like a jaguar, and has spots like a jaguar, chances are that when it leaps on you from a tree, you're dead meat. So let's say that Pulphouse is a lot like a four-times-a-year original anthology. This first volume is a state-of-the-art example of desktop publishing done well. The production values and design are executed marvelously. The format for issue one is one thousand copies of a sewn-binding hardback and two hun- dred-fifty copies bound in leather, slip- cased, and signed by all contributors. Both editions are handsome. The plan for Pulphouse is to rotate the editorial focus over the course of a year from horror (issue one) to specula- tive fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. The contents of the first horror number are tremendously eclectic and largely suc- cessful. There is a healthy mix of new and familiar bylines. The excitement and energy levels are high. A few of the stories come across as the sort one oc- casionally stereotypes as Clarion Work- shop exercises — ambitious but arid. But the rest carve out new territory. Michael Bishop's 'A Father's Secret" is a nasty. nasty examination of child abuse. Kij Johnson's "Ferata" takes an M TV-paced ride through vampirism and revenge fantasies — if the word weren't so dumb, "vampunk" might be appropriate. "The Soft Whisper of Midnight Snow" by Charles de Lint is a quietly paced tale of enormous ascending power as an artist learns the true nature of her work. Harlan Ellison contributes a brand-new hard-nosed romance about a guy who falls hopelessly and helplessly in love with the wrong woman. "Public Places" by J. N. Williamson casts a remarkably unblinking eye on a very bad man be- set by occult forces in a dingy men's room. It's a track-stopper. Such writers as Kate Wilhelm, Ron Goulart, William F. Wu, and Steve Rasnic Tern contribute another sixteen stories. Additionally, there's nonfiction, including Jack Wil- liamson's pair of mini-essays about style and tone, Kim Antieau examining the nature of horror, and Jon Gustafson writing about horror art. A lungful of crisp autumn air in an increasingly stuffy field, Pulphouse should be supported. Another anthology well worth buy- ing and reading is Tim Sullivan's Tropi- cal Chills (Avon, $3.95, 258 pp., ISBN CONTINUED ON PAGE 94 Dance a Cemetery Dance with Joe R Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, Thomas F. Monteleone, William ReUingJr., David B. Silva, and Steve Rasnic Tern . . . If you like Twilight Zone, you'll love Cemetery Dance, featuring unique tales of dark fantasy by today's top best-sellers, plus the best of the young "splatter punks." Each issue is jam- packed with fiction, interviews, news and reviews, like our debut issue, in which you'll meet David B. Silva, editor of The Horror Show and author of Come Thirteen, up close and personal in a brand new interview. Then, read "Fury's Child," Silva's latest chilling masterpiece. Plus, there's Steve Rasnic Tern's "The Double," Bentley Little's "The Janitor," and 9 more modern clas- sics of the supernatural! Place your order today because they're going fast, and they're sure to become collector's items! But wait, there's more! After you've devoured our debut issue, you'll want to watch your mailbox for our special All-Pro Issue, featuring 8 new stories by your favorite best-selling au- thors! All this, and you'll also receive a free issue of Nb News, the official New blood Magazine subscriber newsletter, when you subscribe to Cemetery Dance. Cemetery Dance, P.O. Box 189, Riverdale, MD 20737 - Please make check or m.o. payable to Richard Chizmar only I want to subscribe to CD for;- □ One Year - 3 Issues - Only $11.00 □ Two Years - 6 Issues - Only $20.00 □ A Single Issue - $4.00 Name Address City State Zip ♦ TWILIGHT ZONE 15 1988 PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORP SCREEN GAHAN WILSON The Ghosts of Christmas Past hristmastime was just a little brighter and jollier for us last year, since one of the season's big moneymakers, Scrooged (Paramount), came from our special area of the macabre-fantastic That kind of success is always nice to see (even if, sometimes, the particular block- buster isn't) because it means that Hollywood's Men in Suits (who like nothing better than a successful prece- dent) will be encouraged to loosen up with the cash flow a little for new films in the same genre. I'll bet you as much as five dollars that even as I write this, and even as you read it (which is an odd but true sort of simultaneity, when you come to think on it), there are at least a dozen new Christmas fantasy films in various stages of production, and that as many as four of them will be released for our edification in the next Yuletide season. So you'd better watch out. Carol for Another Christmas Scrooged is decidedly uneven, but at its high points it has a fine, raunchy per- versity that definitely added to my holi- day cheer. The script, by Mitch Glazer and Michael O'Donoghue, gets in some nice nasty digs at various worthy tar- gets, and Richard Donner's direction is generally unabashed, free-wheeling, and suited to the outrageous situations and visions he's been given to present. The basic intent of the film is to relocate Dickens's beloved sentimental masterpiece to our present era. The no- tion is such an apt one that if you take the time to pause and give it the honest eye-to-eye examination it deserves, I think you'll find it will startle the hell out of you and set you off along ex- lAAiNb i rip: ScroogecT s Bill Murray rides into his checkered present witl cabbie David Johansen. tremely illuminating lines of thought. I know it did that for me. We have, in our time, accomplished a kind of sociological miracle that I, as a babe, essentially indoctrinated and shaped by the fearless Roosevelt, and as a grown man set further in those ways by the boldly visionary Kennedy, would have thought impossible. Thanks to the extraordinary com- bination of Reaganism and AIDS, we have successfully managed a return to the essential tenets of the Victorian era, to its morbid repressions and universal cruelties. (The total out-of-the-blueness of things certainly does make a mock- ery of the possibility of accurate prediction, does it not?) Some of us hope we have allowed ourselves to be dragged kicking and screaming only a little way back — but others appear to be delighted with the turn of events and have dived with wholehearted enthusi- asm into this return to the past. All of it has, interestingly, produced a much more colorful society. Once again we have flocks of entertainingly bizarre beggars in our streets (together with their attendant workhouses). Once again we have the flamboyant, desperately dramatic (and totally out of control) street criminals to prey on us and give us diverting tabloid reading, just as Jack the Ripper did. (And we also have a return of the obscene pri- sons of those times.) Worst of all, we once again feel free to scorn and ignore the sufferings of everyone who is not in our special group, and we can even find it in our hearts to blame them for their misery. I have done it myself. I shall probably do it again. Perhaps the greatest personal reve- lation I gleaned from Scrooged is that I have all this time been laboring under the naive notion that social progress was a fact, not a belief. I thought it was some final state that had been achieved and, thanks to such visionaries as 16 TWILIGHT ZONE Roosevelt and Kennedy, we would have it always. It was something accom- plished, something done. Now I know better, but it took the collapse of a world to teach me. Dickens would feel quite at home in (and doubtless be just as pissed off with) this new/old society of ours. Okay, so all that aside, the initial challenge the creators of Scrooged set themselves was to figure out a contem- porary vocation loathesome enough to be appropriate to the title character. What occupation in today's society would be sufficiently vile, base, and dishonorable to provide enough scope for the misdeeds of anyone as actively villainous as Scrooge7 Of course! A network television president! And what would be his main preoccupation when we come upon him (aside from destroy- ing anyone or anything that might get in the way of bigger ratings and/or the advancement of his career)? Why, to produce a Christmas television special, to be sure! Bill Murray plays the modern ver- sion of Dickens's antihero with dedicat- ed, dead-eyed enthusiasm. His Scrooge is all executive ambition, all executive paranoia; hip-deep in constant, merci- less calculations. You can almost see the moral blinders flopping on the sides of his head. And his Chirstmas special — ah, what a special it is! Everything you've come to dread in such a production is here: all the terrible casting, all the hideous, life-draining cliches, all the beastliness and cruddiness and total dumbness you've come to expect in such a special. But there are little surprise touches: A confused-looking Buddy Hackett cast as Scrooge. An irascible John Houseman cast as the friendly, wise old reader declaiming sonorously from the big red Christmassy book on his lap. There are also the obligatory leggy Las Vegas dancers as carolers, and all sorts of other stuff to take the television viewers further and further away from the loving spirit of the sea- son and into peevish crankiness as they watch. Of course the essential conflict of the original A Christmas Carol was the constant moral contest going on between Scrooge and the Christmas Spirits. They did not hesitate to show the old repro- bate terrifying visions; they never con- cealed their disapproval of his selfish ways, but the underlying flavor of their arguments was one of reasoned, almost gentle persuasion. In Scrooged, on the other hand, the Spirits take their gloves entirely off, escalating the combative- CONTINUED ON PAGE 92 SUGAR PLUM SCAREY: Delightfully dangerous Christmas sprite Carol Kane gets laughs while going for the eyes. DEAD MEN DO WEAR ARGYLE: Murray’s decidedly decomposing partner (John Forsythe) needs a good stiff drink. TWILIGHT ZONE 17 1988 PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORP ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER R. EMSHWILLER THE MIND’S A Special Report on the Audio Fiction Experience ou walk into a bookstore feverishly searching for the new book by your favorite author, say Stephen King or Arthur C. Clarke. You run to the bestseller rack and -Oh, no! It isn't there! You'll have to wait another week, you think, wishing these publishers would get on the ball. But then something on a nearby rack catches your eye. It has the author's name on it, along with the title you heard about. But it isn't a book. It's a couple of audio cassettes in a box. You pause. You're used to savoring this writer's words in print. How will it feel to hear him read the stuff? You're not sure, but man-oh-man you need those cassettes because you've loved everything he's ever written. You buy the tapes. And you listen. And you realize this audio thing is very different from reading a book. Of course there isn't anything all that new about hearing fiction read aloud. Your parents probably read you bedtime stories, or maybe as a kid you told your friends ghost stories. Maybe you've even heard "The Shadow" or some of the other great old radio plays. But now that a lot of people can afford personal stereos, more and more publishers are hoping you will want to hear a piece of fiction as much as you want to read it. Several publishers are producing more audio tapes than they ever have before -not just for folks who have trouble reading, but for all of us who like stories. This means that audio fiction is changing and growing. It is moving away from the utilitarian and becoming its own art form. We thought it was about time we gave you our view of this developing medium by offering you a selection of what's available on tape, as well as presenting you with an intimate taste of our personal experiences. We want you to know how it feels to hear a great horror or science fiction story on audio. So come with us now into an alternate dimension of sound, where the doorway to the imagination is the mind's ear. . . . 18 TWILIGHT ZONE TERROR IN THE DARK What happens when you close your eyes...? by Jillian Smith HERE ARE YOU, ALONE IN THIS DARK place without landmarks, with- out the safety of visual cues? And what is that noise, that approaching sound? What is waiting out there to touch you? I would like to take you on a trip, a trip into horror. First, well look for it in a place you've found it before — inside the flickering dimness of a movie theater. Then, well go into the deeper darkness you can only find with the mind's ear. I think youll discover something about yourself there; something you may have suspected, but never admitted. So come with me. Sit down, relax, and don't resist. The Viewing Experience Your eyes are open, wide open, as you sit in the theater absorbing the images flashing in front of you. People are be- ing killed. You become uneasy as you witness their deaths, but you never see the killer. She is going to die, that woman on the screen; you do not know when, but you sense it's coming soon. You watch the fear on her face, her mouth moist and wantonly gaping, a mouth that moments ago was dressed in the most composed smile. Oh, God, it's coming. You can feel it. Yes, there it is, the killer! No, wait! That latex, rigid thing edged in neon blue can't be the fear- some creature that's been ravaging doz- ens of people. It's all wrong. As you watch, your fear evaporates, while the woman on the screen, the woman whose fear you shared, continues to squirm and gape and look ridiculous. Suddenly you're wishing it would kill her and get it over with; she's making a fool of herself. The horror experience has failed. The story is over and the house lights creep on; people are leaving and you have readjusted completely to yourself. Maybe if they had let you make the film, (close your eyes) the image of the killer would have been unbearable; the audience would have gone mad. But no. There would always be something missing. If you can see something in sharp, brilliant focus; if you know what it is, how much can it really scare you? The movie screen doesn't leave enough room for the creatures of your imagi- nation to writhe. So follow me again. Into the dark. A HIS DARK POWERFUL IMAGINATION - ND HIS SKILL MAKE THE HORROR GRISLY AND EFFECTIVE' PENTHOUSE TH I READ BY THE AUTHOR. BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WEAVE WOR LD The Listening Experience Close your eyes. It's just you, alone, in the dark- TWILIGHT ZONE 19 TERROR ness. Your mind is the screen and your imagination is the projectionist. Here no one can tell you what to see. No one can stop you from creating. You can't even stop yourself. (Slip in the tape. Dare to press the button.) A few bars of music begin to play, preparing you for the voyage, easing you in slow- ly, gently. The story begins. (Keep your eyes closed.) At first you're feeling removed, as if it's not your story, your experience. You wait to be swept along, passive and powerless, just like when you were in the movie theater. Soon enough, though, it begins: Sounds and voices flash im- ages on the screen in your mind. There's After listening to the audio horror tapes night upon night, in the rare quiet of the city, the darkness of early morn- ing, I've noticed my manner has changed. I've become more nervous than usual. When I finished listening to one of the tapes, I would sit for a few minutes try- ing to regain my balance, trying to shake the horror from my mind. I searched for that period of readjustment that comes so easily after a movie ends. I wanted the credits to roll, to reassure me that the people were only actors, as I recalled my place in society, my name. It didn't happen. No credits, no reassur- ance. I was like a child, repeating over and over, "It was only a story." It was you will feel quietly unsettled. The calm way in which the voice tells tales of twisted minds -the sort that delight in murder and mutilation — is seriously dis- turbing. That unique blend of terror and class has made Poe the master of eloquent horror. Poe is not the only sophisticate available on audio cassette. You can sample Bram Stoker's Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ambrose Bierce's The Damned Thing, or W.W. Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw. The Mon- key's Paw is a story that dug its claws deep into my imagination when I was young. As a matter of fact, it was first one character you're particularly identi- fying with. S/he even resembles you. The two of you are both feeling fear; sweat is slowly crawling down your face. What is it you are afraid of? (The tape plays on.) What character have you become in your imagination? You must be the one cowering in the darkness, in the false security of the corner. (You can stop the tape if you want, but you won't.) Trembling, you wait, one with the victim, for what you knew all along was going to happen. But something is already happen- ing to you, here in the dark. You are not the victim, are you? That expres- sion on your face is not the fright of an innocent person. No, you have become something you never dreamed. You are the killer. An unspeakable passion oozes through you. You have allowed it to spill through your body, because you are alone, because it's dark. All you wanted was a little taste, just a taste of the other side of fear. Sleeping in you all this time was this desire, and no one knew. You never knew, until you were left alone with the blackness. Now you know the secret. No one needs to show you what horror looks like; you are the horror. Warning: These tapes May Cause Some Minor Side Effects You see what I'm saying. The new wave of audio horror has rediscovered a se- cret that the radio age knew all too well. Terror that comes in the dark isn't safe. It creeps up from deep inside you, uses your own imagination to make itself real. as if the tape wasn't over, as if it con- tinued to play in some mechanism im- planted in my head. At first I thought it couldn't be the tapes, yet I find I spend my days in ap- prehension and my nights in a struggle to sleep. I see every color of the night sky as it changes by the hour, until fi- nally it becomes light and I can admit that sleep has escaped me once again. I'm hoping it will wear away with time. I'm hoping I can convince myself it wasn't me; I wasn't the one on the tape. But it hasn't happened yet. A part of me is still there, with the horror, lost in the heart of the darkness. Truly Disturbing Horror If you want to join me here in the dark, it's easy to begin. There's a large selec- tion of truly disturbing horror available on tape these days, so you should have no problem finding a starting point. The stories are presented in two basic ways: narration and dramatiza- tion. Narration is like a bedtime story, with one person reading all parts of the tale. Dramatization, like a play, has only dialogue, with different actors play- ing each part. For sheer, classic terror, there's no better place to start than Edgar Allan Poe. Plenty of Poe can be found on au- dio cassette from a variety of distribu- ters. Poe sounds wonderful when he's read aloud, most often by a single, dis- tinguished male voice. You will find the readings create a sense of isolation that allows your imagination to romp around and create as much as it wants. As that stately, theatrical voice tells the tale. told to me as a ghost story. I've never read it and I've never forgotten it. For those of you who are new to it, it's a tale of a couple who get their hands on a trinket with the power to grant three wishes. Devastated by the death of their son, the couple ask an un- speakable favor of the paw, and in turn, receive an unspeakable result. Without resorting to graphic gore, The Monkey's Paw works on your imagina- tion, making you conjure the horror on the other side of the door. It is the sort of tale that can haunt you for years. Books on Tape offers an unedited version of Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, and Spoken Arts, an abridged one. I listened to the Spoken Arts version and was completely enve- loped as actors read the parts of those unforgettable characters. Since I am so fond of the novel, I expected to be dis- appointed in the reading, but I loved every minute of this classic story of a scientist who dares to play God by creating a man out of spare parts. I strongly recommend this tape, especial- ly to those who have never read the novel; it is a far stranger story than the one you know from the movies. More recent "classics" can be found on tape, too. Robert Bloch's Psycho is available from Listening Library. The short novel that Hitchcock interpreted so well is stunning in its original form. Certainly, Janet Leigh will flash through your mind when the infamous shower scene plays. But I should warn you, there are a few things about Norman Bates that Hitchcock didn't show us ... . George Romero's Night of the Liv- CONTINUED ON PAGE 95 20 TWILIGHT ZONE SKIFFY ON THE SUBWAY Listening to the Music of the Spheres — by Margaret Mayo McGlynn L ike horror audio, sf on tape can take you into another di- mension of sound. But horror fiction draws you into a disturb- ing universe. Science fiction, or sci-fi, or "skiffy" (a term used by sf hipsters) — even at its most dystopian — tends to act like a spaceship or time machine, flying you away from the uncomforta- ble aspects of everyday life. As a kid, I relished sf's out-of-real- ity experience. I used to shut the door of my bedroom, flop down on my four- poster bed, open a book and jump glee- fully into a different world. In later years, I realized that science fiction had not merely offered me a momentary escape from a not-so-blissful childhood. It had taught me to see life in a new way— a way analogous to when an art- ist steps back from a painting to get a better sense of the whole composition. When I began listening to some of my favorite stories on tape, I was hoping audio as a medium would be able to preserve — and perhaps even enhance— all of science fiction's unique qualities. As I pulled out my headphones and tape player for my first listen to an sf story, I wondered why the genre need- ed to be translated into audio. Shouldn't reading the words on the page be enough? But I plunged into the tapes, summon- ing up my critical faculties. When I criticize anything, I am of two minds— or personas. The first is the slightly curmudgeonly aesthetic purist I learned to be sometime in high school. The second is the media mani- ac, the TV generation kid— about twelve years old, crying towel in hand, eyes perpetually glued to some kind of glow- ing screen, scarfing down popcorn by the bucket. These two tend to have little family squabbles inside my head, but sometimes they agree. And I trust both of them to help me make judgments. I usually listened to the audio tapes while riding the R train from Manhat- tan to my apartment in Queens. Both sides of me love music, and I've found my headphones do a good job of trans- porting my mind away from that evil underground. Reading science fiction is also a good ticket out of those screech- ing grottoes of hell. Therefore I figured that a "subway stress test" would work for science fiction on audio. After listen- ing to a batch of tapes while shunting back and forth from Queens, I realized the environment gave the TV kid in my head the upper hand on a number of occasions. When I get cranky, she's at the peak of her power. (And who doesn't get cranky down there?) But even the pickiest intellectual purist will CONTINUED ON PAGE 95 TWILIGHT ZONE 21 "TEAM TZ": Story Editor Joe Straczynski; Casting Director Mary Ann Barton; and Executive Producer Marc Shelmerdine. 22 TWILIGHT ZONE RETURN OF THE ZONE PART FIVE First, the news. The very last installment of the new, syndicated Twilight Zone, Harlan Ellison's "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich," entered production on December 12, 1988, one year, two months, and eleven days after I was first hired to story-edit the show. We had wanted to end production with our least complicated episodes. But, naturally, we finished with the most complex. "Soup" required over one hundred camera setups (nearly thirty percent over the average), and the most elaborate ef- fects of any of the episodes. (Harlan is still astonished by this. “It's just a simple little story" he said to me the other day. I think I will have that engraved on my headstone.) "Soup" is directed by Paul Lynch, and stars Anthony Fransciosa in the role of Nino Ventura, a suave underworld type who has an unusual encounter with someone who hails from an even deeper Underworld. Final casting announce- ments have also been made for the other shows which have been completed. Janet Leigh stars in "Rendezvous in a Dark Place," a story about a lonely woman's flirtation with death, and what happens when she's rejected even by him, written by J. Michael Straczynski, and directed by Rene Bonniere. Pamela Bellwood stars in "Cat and Mouse," a story about an oversexed werecat with one of the nastiest, sharpest endings I've ever seen, written by Christy Marx, and directed by Eric Till. David Naughton (of An American Werewolf in London) stars in "Special Service," a comic episode about paranoia that asks the question, "What do you do when you find out they really are watching you?" written by J. Michael Strac- zynski, and directed by Randy Bradshaw. Ben Murphy plays the lead in "Love is Blind," about one man’s decision to kill his wife, and the outside interference that affects his plan, writ- ten by Cal Willingham and directed by Gilbert Shilton. There's one other piece of news that has been withheld up until now, and this notice in Twilight Zone Magazine marks the first time any mention has been made of it, anywhere. One afternoon, a package arrived at the TZ3 offices from a source that must remain, for the time being, unidenti- fied. I had been told to expect the package, but to keep its existence secret until its contents had been examined, and a determination had been made as to their disposition. What I discovered within were four unproduced scripts left over from the original Twilight Zone. There was "Pattern for Doomsday" and "Who Am 17," both ghost-written by Jerry Sohl for Charles Beaumont (the note on both cover pages, signed by Sohl, reads, "Written by Jerry Sohl for Charles Beaumont in an agreement centered on his increasing diffi- culties in writing because of Alzheimer's disease, which he did not then know he had; the work was done to aid Chuck and his family.") Then there was "What the Devil!" by Arch Oboler, dated ^ In Which the Author Speculates on Things Long Hidden (Whether They Wanted to Be or Not) article by J. Michael Straczynski Copyright © 1989, Synthetic Worlds, Ltd. PHOTOS BY J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI TWILIGHT ZONE 23 RETURN OF THE ZONE June 11, 1963, and "Many, Many Monkeys," written by William Froug, dated January 20, 1964. My task: to review them and determine which, if any, we could produce for TZ3. We picked "Many, Many Monkeys." It was a chilling story about the consequences of our continued inhumanity, our decision not to see the problems and pains that afflict our fel- lows. In that respect, the story was as timely now as when it was first written. Only minor revisions were required to bring it up to date in other respects. It was technical stuff, mainly. One of the plot complications is attributed to an atomic test in the atmosphere, something which isn't done anymore, and even if it were done, we know now that the radiation wouldn't have the effects necessary for the story. An accident at a biological warfare plant was substituted. Directed by Richard Bugajski, "Many, Many Monkeys" stars Karen Valentine as the nurse who becomes involved in the resulting plague in an intriguing manner. . .a plot description also applicable to the script as it was written twenty-five years ago for the original Twilight Zone. It was a nice way to end the writing season, further confirming our commitment to meld the old TZ with the new. What goes around. . .comes around. More than you'd ever suspect. Private Triumphs, Public Disappointments As the Constant Reader has probably guessed by now, a lot of people invested tremendou* amounts of time, and effort, and blood, and dreams in trying to bring The Twilight Zone back from that silent place TV shows go when they are can- celed. To the extent that we succeeded, we are gratified, and couldn't have asked for better. But one aspect remains to sadden us all. (Actually, "sadden" is an understatement, but I'm trying desperately here to retain some degree of journalistic objectivity.) Very often, when I tell people that I'm working on the new Twilight Zone, the usual response is, "Oh, I didn't know that was back on." And that is the heart of the one problem that has afflicted TZ3 since its release— a problem that many of you may have noticed by now. After all the effort to produce the shows, there was vir- tually no follow-up to promote the series. In point of fact, about two weeks before the show hit the air— after constant complaints from our office to MGM/UA that there had been no ads, no articles, no attempt to contact magazines, no men- tion in the trades, no mention in the many articles summing up the new sf/fantasy series (USA Today missed us three times running, mentioning every other syndicated series from Friday the 13th to War of the Worlds) . . . after all that, we learned that there was virtually no money allocated to pro- mote TZ3, and that the few P.R. people at MGM/UA who had been slotted to handle the show had been terminated. Two weeks to air, we had been orphaned. There's this syndrome I call the Trap Door Complex. It comes to the accompaniment of thunder and blood pounding in your ears. It is that terrible, glacier-like feeling that chills you to the bone as you hang up the phone and realize that you have been cut off at the knees. A sense of weightlessness as the trap door opens beneath you and you fall, and you know there's not a damned thing you can do about it. The TZ3 trap door opened when we heard that news, and we all fell through it. Good intentions, hard effort, scripts and cast and crew. ..all of it. Because it wouldn't matter how well we had done our jobs if no one knew we existed. We shifted gears as quickly as possible. In the midst of editing the last few episodes, I requisitioned all the P.R. material to be sent to my office. I then began a one-man publicity campaign. Phone calls were placed and letters sent to newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations. On several occasions I found myself giving a phone interview while simultaneously editing a script. If it had not been for the support of the TZ3 West Coast crew, including Suzy Eliot, our peripatetic secretrary/bringer of cheer/raider of my chocolate vault, I think I would have gone mad. As it was, outbursts were confined to occasional crazed memos, exem- plified by the following, sent to my producer and— well, someone else: To: Rod Serling, Address Unknown From: J. Michael Straczynski Date: 20 September 1938 Re: Publicity, and Your Show Dear Mr. Serling, It may come as some surprise to you that we have re- vived your series for yet a third incarnation. We regret the delay in your discovery, but for what it’s worth, it appears that virtually no one knows about the new show. I know this may be difficult to believe— after all, The Twilight Zone is one of the most easily marketable names in the history of American television— but it is quite true. We’ve learned of late that we fall under the umbrella of MGM/UA HPP (Hidden Program Project). The idea of this program, as near as we can determine, is to keep the Ameri- can public utterly and completely in the dark concerning the existence of any programs under that heading. Calls from press eager to provide coverage and interviews are not returned, no attempt is made to foster a relationship with magazines (especially with TV Guide, that focus for all evil in the world), and responsibility is circulated around so that no one is really sure who should be spoken to about what. You’ll note the attached clipping [from USA Today], in which every other syndicated series on the planet is men- tioned— except the new Twilight Zone. This is at least the third article with this sort of glaring omission. We are very pleased to see that MGM’s HPP is working away overtime, keeping us from being associated with the product of other studios not as fortunate in having their own HPP. We’re reasonably sure that the HPP is similar to the U.S. Forestry’s “Let It Burn” program, which has given a new and far more streamlined look to Yellowstone National Park. This may seem a curious way to do business, but we’re assured that this is truly the best way. And we support it wholeheartedly. There is, after all, rio real challenge in mar- keting something as instantly recognizable as The Twilight Zone. Even a hydrocephalic infant could get us coverage in, say, TV Guide or The Los Angeles Times or any of a hun- dred other newspapers. And if there’s no challenge, there’s no point in trying. This is an admirable, a courageous stance, and we’re mightily impressed. We hope that those handling the P.R. on this show can eventually find some- thing up to their abilities— perhaps; helping market Ausch- witz as a health spa .... That the show has done as well as it has, without the benefit of a decent publicity campaign, is the best testimony to the response to our efforts that one could ask for. Such is life. So it goes. Selah. Present Tense, Future Imperfect From the day Tappan King commissioned these articles, I conceived of them as letters written to an unseen friend, as honest and as personal as I could make them. And now that I come at last to the end of this report from inside the third CONTINUED ON PAGE 87 24 TWILIGHT ZONE RETURN OF THE ZONE 4jgta Atlantis Films head Seaton McLain, aka "The Man from Atlantis." Sue Phillips, production coordinator for Atlantis Films' Toronto studios. TWILIGHT ZONE 25 FICTION BY JOHN VA R L E Y JUST RNOTHER PERFECT DRV ILLUSTRATION BY PETER SCANLON Don't Worry. Everything is under control. I know how you're feeling. You wake up alone in a strange room, you get up, you look around, you soon dis- cover that both doors are locked from the outside. It's enough to unsettle any- body, especially when you try and try and try to recall how you got here and you just can't do it. But beyond that . . . there's this feel- ing. I know you're feeling it right now. I know a lot of things — and I'll reveal them all as we go along. One of the things I know is this: If you will sit down, put this mes- sage back on the table where you found it, and take slow, deep breaths while counting to one hundred, you'll feel a lot better. I promise you will. Do that now. See what I mean? You do feel a lot better. That feeling won't last for long. I'm sorry to say. I wish there was an easier way to do this, but there isn't, and believe me, many ways have been tried. So here we go: This is not 1986. You are not twenty-five years old. The date is January February March April May June man i 4 la tt 12 ip oa ?nns £vw awr Lt\J\JO A lot of things have happened in twenty twenty one twenty-two years, and I'll tell you all you need to know about that in good time. ► When things seem darkest, you may wish you could wake up tomorrow with a new life-a clean slate. But what kind of price would you have to pay! TWILIGHT ZONE 27 PERFECT DRV This morning you woke up and couldn’t remem- ber anything after the summer of '86. But the year is 2008, and we’re beginning to think a pattern is established. For now. . .Don't Worry. Slow, deep breaths. Close your eyes. Count to a hundred. You'll feel better. I promise. If you'll get up now, you'll find that the bathroom door will open. There's a mirror in there. Take a look in it, get to know the forty five forty -s ix forty-seven -year- old who will be in there, looking back at you. . . And Don't Worry. Take deep breaths, and so forth. I'll tell you more when you get back. Well. I know how rough that was. I know you're trembling. I know you're feeling confusion, fear, anger. . .a thousand emotions. And I know you have a thousand questions. They will all be answered, every one of them, at the proper time. Here are some ground rules. I will never lie to you. You can't imagine how much care and anguish has gone into the composition of this letter. For now, you must take my word that things will be revealed to you in the most useful order, and in the easiest way that can be devised. You must ap- preciate that not all your questions can be answered at once. It may be harder for you to accept that some questions cannot be answered at all until a prop- er background has been prepared. These answers would mean nothing to you at this point. You would like someone — anyone — to be with you right now, so you could ask these questions. That has been tried, and the results were need- lessly chaotic and confusing. Trust me; this is the best way. And why should you trust me? For a very good reason. I am you. You wrote — in a manner of speaking — every word in this letter, to help yourself through this agonizing moment. Deep breaths, please. Stay seated; it helps a little. And Don't Worry. So now we're past bombshell #2. There are more to come, but they will be easi- er to take, simply because your capaci- ty to be surprised is just about at its peak right now. A certain numbness will set in. You should be thankful for that. And now, back to your questions. Top of the list: What happened? Briefly (and it must be brief — more on that later): In 1989 you had an accident. It in- volved a motorcycle which you don't remember owning because you didn't buy it until 1988, and a city bus. You had a difference of opinion concerning the right of way, and the bus won. Feel your scalp with your finger- tips. Don't be queasy; it healed long ago — as much as it's going to. Under those great knots of scar tissue are the useless results of the labors of the best neurosurgeons in the country. In the end, they just had to scoop out a lot of gray matter and close you back up, shaking their heads sagely and opining that you would probably feel right at home under glass on a salad bar. But you fooled them. You woke up, and there v/as much rejoicing, even though you couldn't remember anything after the summer of '86. You were con- scious a few hours, long enough for the doctors to determine that your intelli- gence didn't seem to be impaired. You could talk, read, speak, see, hear. Then you went back to sleep. The next day you woke up, and couldn't remember anything after the summer of '86. No one was too wor- ried. They told you again what had happened. You were awake most of the day, and again you fell asleep. The next day you woke up, and couldn't remember anything after the summer of '86. Some consternation was expressed. The next day you woke up, and couldn't remember anything after the summer of '86. Professorial heads were scratched, seven-syllable Latin words in- toned, and deep mumbles were mumbled. The next day you woke up, and couldn't remember anything after the summer of '86. And the next day And the next day And the day after that. This morning you woke up and couldn't remember anything after the summer of '86, and I know this is get- ting old, but I had to make the point in this way, because it is 2006 2002 2008 and we've begun to think a pattern is established. No, no, don't breathe deeply, don't count to one hundred, face this one head on. It'll be good for you. Back under control? I knew you could do it. What you have is called Progres- 28 TWILIGHT ZONE sive Narco-Catalepti-Amnesiac Syn- drome (PNCAS, or "Pinkus" in conver- sation), and you should be proud of yourself, because they made up the term to describe your condition and at least a half-dozen papers have been written proving it can't happen. What seems to happen, in spite of the papers, is that you store and retrieve memories just fine as long as you have a continu- ous thread of consciousness. But the sleep center somehow activates an erase mechanism in your head, so that all you experienced during the day is lost to you when you wake up again. The old memories are intact and vivid; the new ones are ephemeral, like they were recorded on a continuous tape loop. Most amnesias of this type behave rather differently. Retrograde amnesia is seen fairly frequently, whereby you gradually lose even the old memories and become as an infant. And progres- sive amnesias are not unknown, but those poor people can't remember what happened to them as little as five min- utes ago. Try to imagine what life would be like in those circumstances before you start crying in your beer. Yeah, great, I hear you whine. And what's so great about this ? Well, nothing, at first glance. I'll certainly be the last one to argue about that. My own re-awakening is too fresh in my mind, having happened only fif- teen hours ago. And, in a sense, I will soon be dead, snatched back from this mayfly existence by the greedy arms of Morpheus. When I sleep tonight, most of what I feel to be me will vanish. I will awake, an older and less wise man, to confusion, will read this letter, will breathe deeply, count to one hundred, stare into the mirror at a stranger. I will be you. And yet, now, as I scan rapidly through this letter for the second time today (I said I wrote it, but only in a sense; it was written by a thousand mayflies), they are asking me if there is anything I wish to change. If I want a change, Marian will see that it is made. Is there anything I would like to do differently tomorrow? Is there something I want to tell you, my successor in this body, to beware of, to disbelieve? Are there any warnings I would issue? The answer is no. I will let this letter stand, in its en- tirety. There are things still for you to learn that will convince you, against all common sense, that you have a won- derful life /day ahead of you. But you need a rest. You need time to think. Do this for me. Go back to the date. Mark out the last number and write ij the next. If it's a new month, change that, too. Now you will find the other door will open. Please go into the next room, where you will find breakfast, and an envelope containing the next part of this letter. Don't open it yet. Eat your breakfast. Think it over. But don't take too long. Your time is short, and you won't want to waste it. That was refreshing, wasn't it? It shouldn't surprise you that all your favorite breakfast foods were on the table. You eat the same meal every morning, and never get tired of it. And I'm sorry if that statement took some of the pleasure out of the meal, but it is necessary for me to keep reminding you of your circumstances, to prevent a cycle of denial getting started. Here is the thing you must bear in mind. Today is the rest of your life. Because that life will be so short, it is essential that you waste none of it. In this letter I have sometimes stated the obvious, written out conclusions you have already reached — in a sense, wast- ed your time. Each time it was done — TWILIGHT ZONE 29 PERFECT DRV Now about the Martians. You are their fair-haired boy. Why? Because you don’t experience time like the rest of humanity does. The Martians spend time with people like you. We think they want to teach us something. and each time it will yet be done in the rest of this letter — was for a purpose. Points must be driven home, sometimes brutally, sometimes repetitiously. I prom- ise you this sort of thing will be kept to an absolute minimum. So here comes a few paragraphs that might be a waste of time, but really aren't, as they dispose neatly of several thousand of the most burning questions in your mind. The questions can be summed up as "What has happened in twenty years?" The answer is: You don't care. You can't afford to care. Even a brief synopsis of recent events would take hours to read, and would be the sheerest foolishness. You don't care who the President is. The price of gaso- line doesn't concern you, nor does the victor in the '98 World Series. Why learn this trivia when you would only have to re-learn it tomorrow? You don't care which books and movies are currently popular. You have read your last book, seen your last movie. Luckily, you are an orphan with no siblings or other close relatives. (It is lucky; think about it.) The girl you were going with at the time of your accident has forgotten all about you— and you don't care, because you didn't love her. There are things that have hap- pened which you need to know about; I'll speak of them very soon. In the meantime .... How do you like the room? Not at all like a hospital, is it? Comfortable and pleasant— yet it has no windows, and the only other door was locked when you tried it. Try it again. It will open now. And remember. . . Don't Worry. Don't Worry. Don't Worry. Don't Worry. You will have stopped crying by now. I know you desperately need some- one to talk to, a human face to look into. You will have that very soon now, but for another few minutes I still must reach out to you from your recent past. Incidentally, the reason the breath- ing exercises and the counting are so ef- fective is a post-hypnotic suggestion left in your mind. When you see the words Don't Worry, it relaxes you. It seems that some part of your mind retains shadows of memory that you can't reach — which may also account for why you believe all this apparent rubbish. Are the tears dry? It did the same thing to me. Even seeing my own face aged in the mirror didn't affect me like seeing the view from my windows. Then it became real. You are on one of the top floors of the Chrysler Building. Your view to the north included many, many buildings that were not there in 1986, and jum- bled among them were many familiar buildings, distinctive as fingerprints. This is New York, and it is a new cen- tury, and that view is impossible to deny and as real as a fist. That's why you wept. Not too many more bombshells to go now. But the next one is a doozy. Let's creep up on it, shall we? You've already looked at the three photographs on the table beside your breakfast. Consider them now, in order. The big, bluff, hearty-looking fel- low is Ian MacIntyre, whom you'll meet in a few minutes. He will be your coun- selor/companion today, and he is the head of a very important project in which you are involved. It's impossible not to like him, though you, like me, will try to resist at first. But he is too wise to push it, and you've always liked people, any- way. Besides, he has a lot of experience in winning your friendship, having done so every day for eight years. On to the second picture. Looks almost human, doesn't he? If the offspring of Gumby and E.T. could be considered human. He is humanoid: two eyes, nose, mouth, two arms and two legs, and that goofy grin. The green skin you'll get used to quickly enough. What he is, is a Martian. See, fifteen years ago the Martians landed and took over the planet Earth. We still don't know what they plan to do with it, but some of the theories are not good news for Homo sapiens. Don't Worry. Take a few deep breaths. Ill wait. That last thought is unworthy of you and unjust. I would not waste your time with a practical joke. You must realize I can back up what I say. To illustrate, I want you to go to the south windows of your apartment. Go through the billiard room into the spa, turn left at the gym, and open the door beside the Picasso, the one that didn't open before. You'll find yourself in an area with a view of the Narrows, and I'm sure I won't need to direct you beyond that. Take a look, and come right back. All right, you just had to prove you could do things your own way, didn't you? I don't care that you brought the letter with you, but your having done so provides one last bit of proof that I know you pretty well, doesn't it? 30 TWILIGHT ZONE Now, back to the bloody Martians. It's amazing how on-target Steve Spielberg was, isn't it? The way that ship floats out there, .and it's bigger than the mother ship in Close Encoun- ters. That sucker is over thirty miles across. At its lowest point it is two miles in the air. The upper parts reach into space. It has floated out there for fifteen years and not budged one inch. People call it The Saucer. There are fif- teen others just like it, hovering near other major cities. And you think you have detected a flaw, don't you? How would you have seen it, you ask, if it had been a cloudy day? If it had been just a normal New York smoggy day, for that matter. Then you'd be reading this, scratching your head, wondering what the hell I'm talk- ing about. The answer will illustrate every- one's concern. There are no more cloudy days in New York. The Martians don't seem to like rain, so they don't let it happen here. As for the smog. . .they told us to stop it, and we did. Wouldn't you, with that thing floating out there? About the name, Martians. . . We first detected their ships in the neighborhood of Mars. I know you'd have found it easier to swallow, in a perverse way, had I told you they came from Alpha Centauri or the Andromeda Galaxy or the planet Tralfamadore. But people got to calling them Martians be- cause that's what they were called on television. We don't think they're really from Mars. We don't know where they're from, but it's probably not from around here. And , by that, I mean not just an- other galaxy, but another universe. We think our own universe exists sort of as a shadow of them. This will be hard to explain. Take it slowly. Do you remember Flatland, and Mr. A Square? He lived in a two-dimen- sional universe. There was no up or down, just right and left, forward and backward. He could not conceive the notion of up or down. Mr. Square was visited by a three-dimensional being, a sphere, who drifted down through the world of Flatland. Square perceived the sphere as a circle that gradually grew, and then shrank. All he could see at any one moment was a cross-section of the sphere, while the sphere, god-like, could look down into Mr. Square's world, even touch inside Square's body with- out going through the skin. It was all just an interesting intellec- tual exercise, until the Martians arrived. Now we think they're like the sphere, and we are Mr. Square. They live in another dimension, and they don't per- ceive time and space like we do. An example: Ydfa saw they appeared humanoid. We don't think they really are. We think they simply allow us to see a portion of their bodies which they project into our three-dimensional world and cause to appear humanoid. Their real shape must be vastly complex. Consider your hand. If you thrust your fingers into Flatland, Mr. Square would see four circles and not imagine them to be connected. Putting your hand in further, he would see the circles merge into an oblong. Or an even bet- ter analogy is the shadow-play. By suit- ably entwining your two hands in front of a light, you can cast a shadow on a wall that resembles a bird, or a bull, or an elephant, or even a man. What we see of the Martians is no more real than a Kermit the Frog hand puppet. The ship is the same way. We see merely a three-dimensional cross-sec- tion of a much larger and more com- plex structure. At least we think so. Communication with the Martians is very frustrating, nearly impossible. They are so foreign to us. They never tell us anything that makes sense, never say the same thing twice. We assume it would make sense if we could think the TWILIGHT ZONE 31 % IT PERFECT DRV Let us speak of love for a moment. Let me tell you, Marian is in love with you, and before the day is over, you will be in love with her. For you, it’s always the first time. . . . way they do. And it is important. They are very powerful. Weather control is just a parlor trick. When they invaded, they invaded all at once— and I hope I can explain this to you, as I'm far from sure I understand it myself, after a full day with Martians. They invaded fifteen years ago. . . but they also invaded in 1854, and in 1520, and several other times in the "past." The past seems to be merely an- other direction to them, like up or down. You'll be shown books, old books, with woodcuts and drawings and contempo- rary accounts of how the Martians ar- rived, what they did, when they left . . . and don't be concerned that you don't remember these momentous events from your high school history class, because no one else does, either. Do you begin to understand? It seems that, from the moment they ar- rived here, in the late part of the twen- tieth century, they changed the past so that they had already arrived several times before. We have the history books to prove that they did. The fact that no one remembers these stories being in the history books before they arrived this time must be seen as an object lesson. One assumes they could have changed our memories of events as easily as the events themselves. That they did not do so means they meant us to be im- pressed. Had they changed both the events and our memories of them, no one would be the wiser; we would all assume history had always been that way, because that's the way we remem- bered it. The whole idea of history books must be a tremendous joke to them, since they don't experience time con- secutively. Had enough? There's more. They can do more than add things to our history. They can take things away. Things like the World Trade Cen- ter. That's right, go look for it. It's not out there, and we didn't tear it down. It never existed in this world, except in our memories. It's like a big, shared illusion. Other things have turned up miss- ing as well. Things such as Knoxville, Tennessee; Lake Huron; the Presidency of William McKinley; the Presbyterian Church; the rhinoceros (including the fossil record of its ancestors); Jack the Ripper (and all the literary works written about him); the letter Q; and Ecuador. Presbyterians still remember their faith and have built new churches to re- place the ones that were never built. Who needed the goddamn rhino,anyway? Another man served McKinley's term (and was also assassinated). Seeing book after book where "kw" replaces "q" is only amusing — and very kweer. But the people of Knoxville— and a doz- en other towns around the world — never existed. They are still trying to sort out the real estate around where Lake Huron used to be. And you can search the world's atlases in vain for any sight of Ecuador. The best wisdom is that the Martians could do even more, if they wanted to. Such as wiping out the element oxygen, the charge on the electron, or, of course, the planet Earth. They invaded, and they won quite easily. And their weapon is very much like an editor's blue pencil. Rather than destroy our world, they re-write it. So WHAT DOES ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH me, I hear you cry. Why couldn't I have lived out my one day on Earth without worrying about this? Well. . .who do you think is paying for this fabulous apartment? The grateful taxpayers, that's who. You didn't think you'd get original Picassos on the walls if you were noth- ing more than a brain-damaged geek, did you? And why are the taxpayers grateful? Because anything that keeps the Martians happy, keeps the taxpayers happy. The Martians scare hell out of everyone . . . and you are their fair- haired boy. Why? Because you don't experience time like the rest of humanity does. You start fresh every day. You haven't had fifteen years to think about the Martians, you haven't developed any prejudice toward them or their way of thinking. Maybe. Most of that could be bullshit. We don't know if prejudice has anything to do with it . . .but you do see time differ- ently. The fact is, the best mathemati- cians and physicists in the world have tried to deal with the Martians, and the Martians aren't interested. Every day they come to talk to you. Most days, nothing is accomplished. They spend an hour, then go wherever it is they go, in whatever manner they do it. One day out of a hundred, you get an insight. Everything I've told you so far is the result of those insights be- ing compiled — — along with the work of others. There are a few hundred of you, around 32 TWILIGHT ZONE the world. No other man or woman has your peculiar affliction; all are what most people would call mentally limited. There are the progressive am- nesiacs I mentioned earlier. There are people with split-brain disorders, peo- ple with almost unbelievable perceptual aberrations, such as the woman who has lost the concept of "right." Left is the only direction that exists in her brain. The Martians spend time with these people, people like you. So we tentatively conclude this about the Martians: They want to teach us something. It is painfully obvious they could have destroyed us any time they wished to do so. They have enslaved us, in the sense that we are pathetically eager to do anything we even suspect they might want us to do. But they don't seem to want to do anything with us. They've made no move to breed us for meat ani- mals, conscript us into slave labor camps, or rape women. They have simply ar- rived, demonstrated their powers, and started talking to people like you. No one knows if we can learn what they are trying to teach us. But it be- hooves us to try, wouldn't you think? Again, you say: Why me? Or even more to the point: Why should I care? I know your bitterness, and I un- derstand it. Why should you spend even an hour of your precious time on prob- lems you don't really care about, when it would be much easier and more satis- fying spending your sixteen hours of awareness gnawing on yourself, wal- lowing in self-pity, and in general being a one-man soap opera. There are two reasons. One: You were never that kind of person. You've just about exhausted your store of self-pity during the pro- cess of reading this letter. If you have only one day— though it hurts like hell ... so be it! You will spend that day do- ing something useful. Reason number two. . . You've been looking at the third picture off and on since you first picked it up, haven't you? (Come on, you can't lie to me.) She's very pretty, isn't she? And that thought is unworthy of you, since you know where this letter is coming from. She would not be offered to you as a bribe. The project managers know you well enough to avoid offer- ing you a piece of ass to get your cooperation. Her name is Marian. Let us speak of love for a moment. You were in love once before. You remember how it was, if you'll allow yourself. You remember the pain . . . but that came later, didn't it? When she re- jected you. Do you remember what it felt like the day you fell in love ? Think back, you can get it. The simple fact is, it's why the world spins. Just the possibility of love has kept you going in the three years since Karen. Well, let me tell you. Marian is in love with you, and before the day is over, you will be in love with her. You can believe that or not, as you choose, but I, at the end of my life here this day, can take as one of my few consola- tions that I /you will have, tomorrow/ today, the exquisite pleasure of falling in love with Marian. I envy you, you skeptical bastard. And since it's just you and me. I'll add this. Even with a girl you don't love, "the first time" is always pretty damn interesting, isn't it? For you, it's always the first time . . . except when it's the second time, just before you sleep. . .which Marian seems to be suggesting this very moment. As USUAL, I HAVE ANTICIPATED ALL YOUR objections. You think it might be tough for her? You think she's suffering? Okay. Admitted, the first few hours are what you might call repetitive for her. You gotta figure she's bored, by now, at your invariant behavior when you first wake up. But it is a cross she bears willingly for the pleasure of your company during the rest of the day. She is a healthy, energetic girl, one who is aware that no woman ever had such an attentive, energetic lover. She loves a man who is endlessly fascinated by her, body and soul, who sees her with new eyes each and every day. She loves your perpetual enthusiasm, your renewable infatuation. There isn't time to fall out of love. Anything more I could say would be wasting your time, and believe me, when you see what today is going to be like, you'd hate me for it. We could wish things were differ- ent. It is not fair that we have only one day. I, who am at the end of it, can feel the pain you only sense. I have my wonderful memories. . which will soon be gone. And I have Marian, for a few more minutes. But I swear to you, I feel like an old, old man who has lived a full life, who has no regrets for anything he ever did, who accomplished something in his life, who loved, and was loved in return. Can many "normal" people die say- ing that? In just a few seconds that one, last locked door will open, and your new life and future love will come through it. 1 guarantee it will be interesting. I love you, and I now leave you . . . Have a nice day. ■ TWILIGHT ZONE 33 a rw In life she had given him a priceless seed of inspiration* Now she was about to give him the most precious gift of all ... . W A TZ FIRST BY DAN BENNETT ILLUSTRATION BY ROGER De MUTH "Nothing's ever gone, child," Maggie was saying. I stood in the front room of the tiny old public library, sobbing, nine years old and confronted for the first time with death. Uncle Warren — my favorite uncle, the one who had taught me to spit and to fish on his farm in South Carolina— was dead. My mother was broken up, and my father was busy making the funeral arrangements. But the library had al- ways felt like home. "Close your eyes, honey." Maggie's big, dark arms reached out to me, and I leaned gratefully into them. "Think of your old uncle, Stevie. Are your eyes closed? You see him there?" I did, and the pain and fear began to fade. "You've still got him, Stevie. He's still there. Nobody's ever really gone, child. Life goes on." I believed her. That was twenty years ago. I REMEMBER THE SMELL OF GRASS THICK with early-morning dampness and — even from back where I stood with Anita and Rod — the smell of the grave, of mildew and red Georgia clay. The old woman's family stood nearer the coffin, huddled together against the chill under a canopy of dark green canvas. Just like when I was a boy, I felt out of place among these people, even Rod and Anita. There was something I didn't understand — I couldn't grasp the faith they had, none of them crying, just clutching their Bibles to their hearts as if they could wring out of the books some comfort. Ashes to ashes, the preacher said. Dust to dust, and the big oak box began to vanish, slowly sinking into a dark hole in the earth. And Maggie was gone. I stood with Rod and Anita, none of us saying a word, as the other mourners drifted away. Finally alone in the cemetery, we walked in quiet uni- son to the edge of the grave. We stood silent there for a minute, maybe two — but in our minds, I know, two decades passed. "Thanks for calling me. Rod." I said, and Anita said, "Yeah. Me, too." "I figured you'd both want to come ^ 34 TWILIGHT ZONE TWILIGHT ZONE 35 Maggie There between Asimov and Bester were six new ones, written by a man named Stephen Barclay. My books. Maggie hadn’t forgotten! back out here for this." Rod scuffed his feet in the grass, uneasy. "Just wish we all could have gotten back together under better circumstances." "It's funny," I said, "We all must have spent half our lives in that library. Maggie looked old enough, even then. Guess I thought she'd be around forever." "She almost was," Rod said. "She worked at the library right up until the end. If she'd stuck around a little bit longer, I could've taken Amy to see her." 'Amy?" "My daughter. She's three. God, Steve, it has been a long time, hasn't it?" "I've got a kid, too," Anita said. She brightened a bit, until I could al- most see the little girl I'd known. 'An eight-month-old boy. Named William Reed, after my husband." "How about you, Steve? Did you ever take time off from your writing to get married?" "Yeah. Her name's Michelle. She's terrific" Rod grinned. "You have a kid?" "No. No such luck." I caught my- self staring into the grave, then looked up and forced a smile. "We'd like to. We really would." "Listen," Rod said, breaking the sudden tension. "I promised Maggie's sister I'd go to the library and collect some stuff for her— family pictures, that kind of thing. Would — uh . . . would you two like to go along and see the old place again?" "No," Anita said. "But I think I have to." I knew how she felt. I didn't go straight to the library. I told Rod and Anita I'd meet them there, then went back to my hotel room. No messages yet, the desk clerk said, and I had to remind myself that it was still early morning in L.A.; still a couple of hours before I would hear any word from Michelle. Unable to stall any longer, I head- ed for the library. The two-lane road curved easily, never exposing what lay beyond the next row of pine trees and dimly famil- iar houses. It would have been easier to find my way if I could have left behind the rented Buick with its smells of plas- tic and vinyl and become a boy again, blanketed in the sweet smell of pines and magnolias, pedaling my three-speed Schwinn and listening to the Four Tops on the little radio taped between the handlebars. I heard a loud clanging from up ahead, then a long, high whistle. When I reached the railroad crossing, the gates were already down and a train was rolling through. I stopped there, watching the brown and orange boxcars rattling past, and everything fell into place as if some- one had found a map of the old town in a comer of my head and unfolded it again. Beyond the train, I knew, was Mick's Country Store— a genuine slice of small-town America, an Old-South cliche brought to glorious life, with wooden floors and a big glass pickle jar on the counter. My heartbeat quickened as I wait- ed for the train to pass, and distantly I thought I might stop in the old store and get myself a Nehi Orange from the big, steel cooler in the back. I could al- most taste the drink, feel the ridged glass bottle in my hands, when the last boxcar passed, and — — nothing. I stared in disbelief at an empty lot, overgrown with weeds and filled 36 TWILIGHT ZONE with cast-off garbage - the red, rusted husks of gutted cars and refrigerators lay where Mick's had been. Across the street stood a Seven-Eleven, bright and shrill and gaudy, its huge iceboxes filled with aluminum cans and bottles made of plastic Twenty years. They had seemed so short to me. I stepped on the gas, suddenly needing to be away from the place. The Buick bolted roughly across the rail- road tracks and over the next hill. And I saw the library. There were already two cars in the gravel lot when I turned the Buick up the drive. Rod and Anita stood waiting at the front door. "It's closed," Anita said, and she rattled the locked door to show me. "No big surprise, I guess." 1 smiled. "Remember when we were kids, and Maggie'd let us sneak our books back a day late, on Sunday? 1 wonder if—" Rod was on his knees before I fin- ished speaking. He tugged at a loose brick at the edge of the doorstep, and when it came free, he stood up, holding a little brass key. "Bingo! Way to go, Steve." He unlocked the door and we stepped inside. The first thing that hit me was the smell of aging paper and cloth— a warm, inviting smell, almost a flavor; not at all unpleasant. I found the light switch, turned it on, but some shadows remained; many of the old, wavy-glass windows had been replaced with duct tape and cardboard. We crossed the uneven wooden floor into the main room, following a well-worn path. In the corners sat pie plates filled with the previous night's rain, filtered though cracks in the ceiling. The library was firmly rooted in the past, but one shelf had always been filled with futures. Out of habit, I went there first, finding the titles that had become the strongest memories of my childhood: Dune, Childhood's End, Fahrenheit 451, Foundation ... all the books I had read and re-read as a child —and there between Asimov and Bester were six new ones, written by a man named Stephen Barclay. My books. Maggie hadn't for- gotten. "Steve! Anita! Take a look at this." Rod stood behind the main desk, look- ing through the brittle pages of a huge, old leather-bound book. "It was in the drawer here. I couldn't resist . . . just look at it." Rod turned the big book so we all could see it. "It's some kind of scrapbook. Look, there's a picture of you, Steve. Nine years old. And this is the article from the Herald, when you won that college writing contest. What's this other stuff?" I leaned in for a close look. "Um . . . that's an interview from Writer's Digest. These are book reviews. Oh, God — that's the first story I ever sold, from Galaxy. Not a bad one, come to think of it. And this—" The last item stopped me cold. It was a library card, with one title and a date circled in red. "Between Planets" I read. "July 20, 1962. That's the first science fiction book I ever read. Maggie—" "Maggie picked it out for you," Rod said. 'Ask me how I knew that." "How7" "Look." Rod turned to two more of the oversized pages. One began with a picture of Rod as a boy, the other with a photo of a young Anita. Rod's page was filled with little clippings, each one announcing the construction of a new building some- where in the South. There was a big ar- ticle from the Herald, "Local man makes good," about the awards Rod had won for his design of an art gallery in Memphis. The library card at the bot- tom of the page read "Buildings and Bridges, August 11, 1958." Anita's page told a similar story— Maggie had loaned her a biography of Elizabeth Blackwell in 1964. The central item on the page was a program from Anita's graduation from Johns Hopkins; it was surrounded by several papers Anita had published in medical journals. "Lord," Anita whispered. "I, uh. . .1 don't guess it could be a coincidence, could it?" "Three times might be a coinci- dence," Rod said, "But not this." He turned page after page, each one reveal- ing another young face and another fu- ture. There were at least thirty of them, maybe forty, spread out over decades. "God," Anita said. "She knew. She really, really knew." "Now wait a minute, you two," I said. "Slow down. How do we know Maggie didn't put all this together just a month ago? It's easy enough to make predictions after the fact." Rod barely let me finish speaking. "Sure it is, Steve, but why in the world would she hang on to all these library cards and clippings? Some of this stuff is twenty-five, thirty years old." "I Relieve it." Anita seemed caught between reverence and a sort of fear. "Maybe it's just because I want to, but I believe it." "Yeah," Rod said. "Look at it this way, Steve — if all this isn't for real, maybe it ought to be." I didn't argue the point. Instead, I made a date to meet them both again before I had to leave Atlanta, then walked out of the library without another word. At the time I thought I was an- gry, although I couldn't have said why. It wasn't until later that I realized the truth: I was envious; I would have given anything to believe it all. There was a package waiting for me at the desk when I got back to the hotel that same afternoon. I thought at first it must have been from Michelle, but the return address was Maggie's. It was postmarked two days before she died. Inside it was a book: The Growing Family. Which would have meant very lit- tle to me, if not for the phone call that came only a minute later. It was Michelle. The tests are positive. We're having a baby. Life goes on ... . I TWILIGHT ZONE 37 A tale of woman. vegetable. Morals Bo carefull in di A JZ FIRST RT ONSIDER, FOR A MOMENT, THE LOWLY POTATO. A LUMPY, grayish-brown root that has never enjoyed the romance so often associated with vegetables. It's not gracefully tapered and brilliantly colored like the carrot. Nor does it hold lonely housewives in thrall like the versatile cucum- ber. It's just a humble, fleshy little tuber, nestled quietly in its bin, never making so much as a peep. Like me, if you ever met a potato on the street you probably wouldn't give it the time of day. You can imagine my alarm when, while I was sitting in the main dining room of the Hasenpfefer, my mashed potatoes spoke to me. The voice was a little garbled because of the extra schnitzel gravy, but it was definitely the potatoes talking. "Pssst." I looked down at my plate and blinked my eyes, as if they were causing some sort of audio hallucination. "Yeah, Runtboy, you. Listen a sec" "Who is that?" I asked, prodding at the edge of the mound with my fork. "Yeah, it's me. Your potatoes. Knock it off with the fork for about half a minute, will you?" I set the fork down and looked toward the ladies' room. Suzy, my girl- friend, had taken off for the powder room with a look of serious intent about an hour before. God only knew what she did in there, but if I knew my little Suzy she'd be back just in time tor order the single most expensive dessert item on the menu. Sometimes she would order two, or even an entree for dessert. I glanced down at the potatoes and a moment of mutual understanding passed between us. Better to finish this little chat before she returned. "It's about Suzy," the spuds continued. "Yeah, Suzy," I answered, transfixed. "Hell of a girl. Nice keester. Frisky. I like her. I like her a lot." And for a strange, blurred moment, the potatoes almost seemed to smile. "I like her, too." I was still getting used to this, so I just tried to keep the conversation going without upsetting the potatoes too much. Deep down, in the pit of my stomach, I was beginning to suspect that would not be a good idea. "Then we agree — this Suzy is a keeper. An A-l, major piece of ord- nance. Outstanding." The potatoes had raised their voice for a second, and I looked around the dining room, expecting to see a few turned heads. But no one else could hear the potatoes. That's how it works in the movies. Warren Beatty comes back with the body of a potato, and only Jack Warden can hear him. But now I could hear all the potatoes iri the restaurant. Most of them were screaming, of course, because they were being tom apart and eaten. Some of the untouched potatoes were shouting subliminal messages at whoever ^ TWILIGHT ZONE 39 they were sitting in front of, trying to put them off their lunch. "Salmonella I" shouted a boiled potato sitting next to a grilled salmon steak. "Roadkill!" hollered the potato pancakes lying next to the sauerbraten. Then the forks and knives would descend, and the horrible screams would begin. As I cupped my hands over my ears, I heard the strangely se- rene voice of my mashed potatoes. "Look, Terry, relax. Those guys are just hamming it up. We potatoes get re- incarnated the instant we die. And the great thing is, we always come back as another type of potato. All I ask is that when my time comes you finish me off fast, so I can hurry back. One of these times I'm gonna return as a bag of cajun- flavored potato chips. God dammit, I love this job! "But listen, Terry, the thing is, I wanted to tell you that I like Suzy, and I think you should marry her." "Marry her? Are you nuts?" I knew this would upset him, but I couldn't help myself. "She's my secretary, for Chrissakes! Why should you give a shit who I marry? I mean, Jesus, you're a lousy plate of yams." "I am not a yam," the potatoes shouted with remarkable authority, and for the first time in my life I feared a side dish. "Don't you ever call me a yam! "Look, kid, listen. First of all, you're not doing this for me alone. You're do- ing it for the mass, collective conscious- ness of all potato-kind. Second, I'm not asking you. I'm telling you. You started this whole thing last weekend when you took Suzy to that sleazy motel and started playing around with the instant mashed potatoes you ordered from room service. Kinky. Most people do that sort of thing with whipped cream or some such nonsense. You were the first person to treat us potatoes so nice. Now that we've got a taste of her, we need you to keep our fantasy alive. Be a sport, Runtman, she's all we've got." The potatoes had a sick, smug look to them, and suddenly I felt like some poor high school schmuck who'd just found out his girlfriend had taken on the football team. I started to say some- thing when I saw Suzy emerge from the ladies' room. Suddenly the potatoes stopped screaming. Then, quietly at first, they started to hum the wedding march — the hellish chant slowly build- ing in pitch. And my mashed potatoes were the loudest of them all. "Here comes the bride! Here comes the bride!" I grabbed the fork and went to work on the potatoes in front of me. They had asked for a quick death, but I just laid the mound open with my fork and let the gravy ooze out. 'AAAaaaaagh! You bastard! You'll pay for this!" they shrieked. "I'll be there. Ill be there every time you order a bag of fries at McDonalds. Every time you open a can of Pringles. No matter where you turn, there'll be a potato, and one of them will have your name on it. You smug little shit. I'll bake in hell with you . . . ack . . . aaaaaaaurgh!" The last of the gravy had flooded my plate, dripping onto the tablecloth. But the other potatoes only sang louder, their strange, lilting voices winding higher and higher like the glee club at an insane asylum. I had to make it stop before it drove me mad. I turned to the next table and hurled a couple of plates of potatoes against the wall, cutting off their voices with two sickening thuds. "Can't you hear them?" I screamed, overturning a potato-laden table. "Can’t you even hear the potatoes in front of you7" But now music was drowning out my voice, and it wasn't the wedding march; it was the theme from "The Newlywed Game." I turned to look at Suzy, who was standing there in a white dress, and suddenly it all fell together: She was part of it. She was the one who started playing "Cement Mixer" with the pota- toes in the first place. She had won them over to her side. And now they wanted me to marry Suzy and live out their twisted fantasies. I looked at Suzy and imagined a life of expensive desserts and rambling post-sexual chatter about crystals. And then I lunged for her with the salad fork. It was hard work, but after a while the singing died out. I LET THE PRISON CHAPLAIN COME TO HEAR my confession today. I'm not a reli- gious guy, but hey. I've seen some pret- ty inexplicable things in my life, and you want to cover all your bases when you're about to go for a lounge on a twenty-thousand-volt La-Z-Boy. So I figured I'd oink a few sins to make the guy feel good, and he could forgive me for whatever crimes I'd committed against his God, who— and I really can't wait to see for myself if I'm right on this — is probably an enormous, omniscient Idaho baker. As I shoved down my last forkful of lobster, he came in, looked at my plate, and offered to wait outside. "I don't want to interrupt your last meal," he said. "That's all right. Padre. I'm fin- ished," I said. The priest nodded toward my leftovers almost reverently. 'Are you sure? You haven't even touched your potatoes." ■ CUTTING TZ QUIZ by Margaret Mayo McGlynn I n this issue's special section on screenwriter Charles Beaumont and his talented colleagues (beginning on page 42), we've offered you a little slice of Hollywood synergy from the years of the first Twilight Zone TV show. We wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the magic that can sometimes happen when talented people collaborate and one great creative mind makes others catch fire. Beaumont was the kind of man who could act as both mentor and muse. Rod Serling also made a point of nurturing talent. And, as you probably know, many of the creative people who worked on The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling's Night Gallery went on to make their own films and TV shows. So, in keeping with this issue's theme we present this "Cutting Room" match-up quiz. In recent quizzes, we've focused on the performers who brought TZ and Night Gallery to life. Here we give you the opportunity to test your knowledge of the people working behind the cameras — writers, directors, and producers. Each pair of titles listed to the left is the work of a single talent. The first title in each pair is a Twilight Zone or Night Gallery episode; the second, another film or television project. See if you can link each pair with its appropriate writer, director, or producer. But wait, there's more! I've built into this quiz a "back door" for the visually minded (or the trivially handicapped, like me). See the weird- looking strip next to the names at right? You can cut out the list and separate the names along the white lines. Those of you who want to save the magazine intact (bless your hearts) can copy this page or trace it. If you can put the design in order so that it spells out the answer to our final bonus question, you'll have the answers to the whole quiz. So go ahead, grab your scissors, and prove you're a cut above the rest! PROJECTS 1. "Nick of Time" (TZ) The Queen of Outer Space (film) 2. "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes" ( NG ) Blue Thunder (film) 3. "A Game of Pool" (TZ) Wanted, Dead or Alive (TV series) 4. "Miniature" (TZ) The Intruder (film) 5. "The Mirror" (TZ) "The Arena" (TV episode for Studio One ) 6. "Logoda's Heads" (NG) The House That Dripped Blood (film) 7. "Cavender is Coming" (TZ) Curse of the Cat People (film) 8. "From Agnes With Love" (TZ) Scrooged (film) 9. "The Housekeeper" (NG) Ice Station Zebra (film) 10. "The Little Black Bag" (NG) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film) 11. "Eyes" (NG) Jaws (film) 12. "Midnight Never Ends" (NG) Supergirl (film) PEOPLE A. Steven Speilberg, director B. Richard Donner, director C. Douglas Heyes, screen writer D. Jeannot Szwarc, director E. John Badham, director/producer gr F. George Clayton Johnson, screenwriter G. Joe Alves, art director rn^mm MB H. Buck Houghton, producer I. Robert Bloch, screenwriter J. Rod Serling, screenwriter u K. Charles Beaumont, screenwriter "1 L. Richard Matheson, screenwriter UL BONUS QUESTION: Name this teleplay about boardroom intrigue by a well- known TZING writer and producer that later became a feature film starring Van Heflin and Everett Sloan. ANSWERS ON PAGE 98 CHARLES BEAUMONT THE CARNINAL ILLUSTRATION BY PETER CUNIS For a young boy in a small town, a carnival has a special kind of magic But for Lars Nielson, trapped in a lifeless body, that magic will soon turn dark and strange .... The cool October rain and the wind blowing the rain. The green and yellow fields melting into gray hills, into gray sky and black clouds. And everywhere, the smell of autumn drinking the coolness, the evening coolness gathering in leaves and wheat and alfalfa, running down fat brown bark, whispering through rich grass to tiny living things. The cool rain, glistening on earth and on smooth cement. "Come on, Lars, I'll beat you!" "Like fun you will!" Two boys with fresh wet faces and cold wet hands. "Last one there is a sissy!" Wild shouts through the stillness and scrambling onto bicycles. A furious pedaling through sharp pinpoints of rain, one boy pulling ahead of the other, straining up the shining cement, laughing and calling. "Just try and catch me now, just try!" “Ill catch you all right, you wait!" "Last one there is a sissy, last one there is a sissy!" ?v CARNIVAL Faster now, flying past the crest of the hill, faster down the hill and into the blinding rain. Faster, small feet run- ning, wheels spinning, along the smooth level. Flying, past outdoor signs and sleeping cows, faster, past strawberry fields and haystacks, little excited blurs of bams and houses and silos. "Okay, I'm going to beat you. I'm going to beat you!" A thin voice lost in the wind. "I'll get to the trestle 'way before you, just watch!" Lars Nielson pushed the pedals an- grily and strained his young body for- ward, gripping the handlebars and sing- ing for more speed. He felt the rain whipping through his hair and into his ears and he screamed happily. He closed his eyes and listened to his voice, to the slashing wind and to the wheels of his bicycle turning in the wetness. Whizzing baseballs in his head, swooping chicken hawks and storm currents racing over beds of light leaves. He did not hear the small voice crying to him, far in the distance. "Who's the sissy, who'll be the sissy?" Lars Nielson sang to the whirling world beside him, and his legs pushed harder and harder. His eyes were closed, so he did not see the face of the frightened man. His ears were full, so he did not hear the screams and the brakes and all the oth- er terrible sounds. The sudden, strange, unfamiliar sounds that were soft and quiet as those in his mind were loud. He pushed his young legs in the black darkness, harder, faster, faster. . . . The room was mostly blue. In the places where it had not chipped and cracked, the linoleum flo.or was a deep, quiet blue. The walls, specially hand-patterned, were a soft greenish blue. And the rows of dishes on high display shelves, the paint on the cane rockers, the tablecloth. Mother's dress. Father's tie — all blue. "The Carnival" was left unpublished at the time of Beaumont's death. It was to have been included in his fourth collec- tion, A Touch of the Creature. The book was scheduled for release in 1964, but, after lengthy negotiations. Bantam Books dropped it in late 1963. "The Carnival," in addition to a num- ber of other previously unpublished stories, has been included in the recent collection Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories, edited by Roger Anker (Dark Harvest Press. P.O. Box 941, Arlington Heights, IL 60006). Even the smoke from father's pipe, creeping and slithering up into the thick air like long blue ghosts of long blue snakes. Lars sat quietly, watching the blue. "Henrik." Mrs. Nielson stopped her rocking. "Yes, yes?" "It is by now nine o'clock." Mr. Nielson took a large gold watch from his vest pocket. "It is, you are right. Lars, it is nine o'clock." Lars nodded his head. "So." Mr. Nielson rose from his chair and stretched his arms. “It is time. Say good night to your mama." "Good night. Mama." "Good night." "So." Mr. Nielson took the wooden bar in his big hands and pushed the chair gently past the doorway and down the hall. With his foot he pushed the door open and when they were inside the bedroom, he pulled the string which turned on the electric light. He walked to the front of the chair. 'Tars, you feel all right now? Nothing hurts?" "No, Papa. Nothing hurts." Mr. Nielson put his hands into his pockets and sat on the sideboard of the bed. "Mama is worried." "Mama shouldn't." "She did not like for you to be mean to the dog." "I wasn't mean." "You did not play with it. I watched, you did not talk to the dog. Boys should like dogs and Mama is worried. Already she took it away." Lars sat silently. Tm sorry. Papa." "It isn't right, my son, that you should do nothing. For your sake I say this." "Papa, I'm tired." "Three years, you do nothing. See, look in the mirror, see at how pale you are getting. Sick pale, no color." Lars looked away from the mirror. "I tell you over and over, you must read or study or play games." "Play games. Papa. . .?" Mr. Nielson began to pace about the room. "Sure, certainly. Games. You can, you can make them up. Play them in your head. You don't have to run around and wave your arms to play games!" Lars looked down, where the car- pet lay thin and unmoving. "But you do nothing. All day I “ Tomorrow is a surprise , Lars. Tomorrow you will see happiness and it will clear your head; then you will he a man! ” work, and hard I work, lifting many pounds, and I come home tired. All day I use my arms and feet and back and I do not want to any more, when I come home, so I don't. I sit in the chair and read. I read, Lars, and 1 smoke my pipe and I talk with Mama. I sit still, like you, but I do something!" With Mr. Nielson's agitated move- ment, the room started to pick at the Feeling. Lars concentrated on white. 'And it don't take my arms and legs to do it. They are tired, they are every way like yours. I am you at night, Lars. And I am old, but I don't sit with noth- ing. I am always playing games, in my head. I don't move, but I don't worry Mama who loves me. I don't move, but I don't say nothing to my mama and papa, ever, just sit staring!" "I'm sorry. Papa." "Then begin to think, Lars. When I come home at night, let me see you talking to Mama, planning things with your brain. The big men are big be- cause of their brains, my son, not their arms and legs. Nothing is wrong with your brain, my son, you didn't hurt it. You have time to leam, to learn anything!" "I will begin to think, Papa." Mr. Nielson rubbed his hands to- gether. They made a rough grating sound. 44 TWILIGHT ZONE 'All right. Tomorrow you tell Mama you are sorry and want to play with the dog. She will get it back for you, and you should smile and thank her and talk to the dog." "I— I can go to bed now?" "Yes." Mr. Nielson leaned forward and slid one arm behind Lars's back, anoth- er beneath his legs. "We are not like others," he said slowly. "When I am gone, there will be nothing, no money. Don't you see why you got to— are you ready?" Mr. Nielson lifted Lars from the wheelchair and laid him on the bed. He sucked on his pipe as he removed shirt, trousers, stockings, and shoes and un- derwear; grunted slightly as he pulled a faded tan nightgown over heavy lengths of steel and rubber. Then he smiled, broadly. "You should say big prayers to- night, my son. You have worried Mama, but even so, tomorrow is a surprise." Lars tried to lift his head. Father stood near the bed, but in the comer, so the big smiling face was hidden. "Tomorrow, Papa?" "I tell you nothing now. But you are a young man now, nearly, and you have promised me that you will begin to think. Isn't that what you promised, Lars?" "Yes." "So. And I believe you. No longer coming home to see you sitting with no thoughts. I believe you and so, tomor- row you get your reward. Tomorrow you will see happiness and it will clear your head; then you will be a man!" Lars stopped trying to move his head. He closed his eyes so that he would not have to stare at the electric light bulb. "Hah, but I don't tell you. Say big prayers, my son. It is going to be good for you from now on." "I will say my prayers tonight. Papa." "Good night, now. You sleep." "Tell Mama — that I'm sorry." Mr. Nielson pulled the greasy string and the room became black but for the coals in his pipe. Lars waited for the door to close and Father's footsteps to stop. Then he moved his lips, rapidly, quietly, fashioning the prayer he had invented. To a still, unmoving God, that he could stay forever in the motionless room, to fight the Feeling. That he could think of colors and nothing and keep the Feeling — the feet across meadows, the arms trembling with heavy pitchforks full of hay, all the parts of life — in a small cor- ner in a far side of his mind. Lars prayed, as Father had suggest- ed. His head did not move when sleep came at last. "You DID NOT TELL HIM, HENRIK?" MRS. Nielson rocked back and forth in the blue cane chair, breaking green beans into small pieces and throwing the pieces into an enamel washbasin. "No." "He never went to one— there never was one in Mt. Sinai since I can remember." "Once when I worked for the fruit company it came here, but we were very busy and I could not go." "Henrik, do you think, will it really be good for him?" "Good? Mama, you do not know. When I went to that one in Snohomish I did not have job to work or money. I just went to look and I didn't spend anything. But there was all the people, everybody in the town, and all laughing. Every- body, laughing. And so much to see!" Mr. Neilson began to chuckle. "Shows and machines and good livestock like you never saw. And funny, crazy peo- ple in a tent. Oh, Mama, when I went home I was happy, too. I didn't worry. Right after, I got a job and met you!" Mrs. Nielson slapped his knees. "How many? Twenty years ago, but see, see how I remember! Lars will be no more like this when he sees all the laughing. He will come home like I did. But I didn't tell him. He don't know." A 'cat scratched at the screen and Mrs. Nielson rose to open the door. She sniffed the air. "Raining." Mr. Nielson took up his newspaper. "Henrik, he can't go on the rides." "So? I went on no rides." "What can he do?" "Do? He can see all the people laughing. And he can see the shows and play with the dice—" "No!" "Mama, he is sixteen, almost a man. He will play with the dice, he will say, and I will throw them. And he will see the frogs jump. And I will take him to the tent with the funny people. The brain, mama, the brain! That is what enjoys the carnival, not arms and legs. That is what will make Lars un- derstand." "Yes, Henrik. We must cheer him up. Maybe after, we can bring him the dog and he will play with it." "Sure, certainly, he will. He will be "happy, not alone in this house, feeling sorry for himself." "Yes." "It will start him to think. He will think about how to make for himself a TWILIGHT ZONE 45 4 - % CARNIVAL living, like anybody else. And he will read books then, you'll see, and find- out what he wants to do. With his brain!" Mrs. Nielson paused before speaking. "Henrik." "Yes?" "What can he do, like you say, with his brain without arms and legs?" "He has arms and legs!" 'As well not, as well no back, no body." "Hilda! He must do something, something. Look at that blind woman who can't hear, like we read in the magazines — she did something. Can't you see. Mama, can you not under- stand? I would take care of Lars, even if it is wrong. But you know the rail- road will give only enough for you when I die, and I am not young. We married late. Mama, very late. If Lars does nothing, how will he live7 Is it an institution for our boy, a home for crip- ples where he sees only cripples all day long, no sunshine? No happiness? For Lars? No! At the carnival tomorrow he will see and begin to think. Maybe to write, or teach or— something!" "But he has not been from the house, since—" "More reason, more!" Mrs. Nielson broke beans loudly. Kindling crackled in the big cast-iron stove. "This blind woman you say about, Henrik. She has feet to walk." "Lars has eyes to see." "This woman has hands to use." “Lars has ears to hear, a brain to think, a tongue to talk!" The cat scratched sharp sounds from the linoleum. Mrs. Nielson rocked back and forth. "This woman has money and friends. She never saw or heard, she cannot remember." Mr. Nielson went to the sink and drew water from the faucet, into a glass. He drank the water quickly. "So, then Lars has a heavier cross and a greater reward." "Yes, Henrik." "You will see. Mama, you will see. After the carnival, he will know what he wants to do. He will begin to think." Mrs. Nielson rose and dusted the bean fragments from her lap, into the wash-basin. She picked up the cat and went outside onto the porch. Then she returned and snapped the lock in the door. "Maybe you are right, Henrik. Maybe anyway he will like little dogs and talk to me. I hope so, I hope so." Mr. Nielson wiped his hands on the sides of the chair and listened to the rain. Lars felt his body being pushed by strong invisible hands, felt himself toppling over like a woolen teddy bear onto Father's shoulder. He bit his lip and closed his eyes. Mr. Nielson laughed, applying the brake. "There now, the turn too sharp, eh, Lars? I will be more careful." The car began to move again, more slowly, jerking, rattling. Lars looked out the windshield at the fields and empty green meadows. "Papa, is it far?" "Hah, you are anxious! No, it is not far. Maybe five miles, right over the bridge." "Will we have to stay long?" Mr. Nielson frowned. "I told Mama we would be back before dark. Don't you want to go, af- ter what I told you, after what you said?" Two children playing in a yard went by slowly. "Don't you want to go, Lars?" "Yes, Papa. I want to." "Good. You don't know. You never saw anything like a carnival, never." Lars closed his mouth and thought of colors. The children touched his mind and he thought of the blue dishes in his home. He opened his eyes, saw the pale road and thought of black nothing. Wind came through the open windows, tossing his brown hair and clawing gently at his face and he thought of the liquid green in a cat's eyes. Mr. Nielson hummed notes from an old song, increasing pressure on the accelerator cautiously. Soon the road became a white highway and other cars went whistling by. Signboards ap- peared, houses, roadside cafes, gasoline stations and little wooden stands full of ripe fruit. And then, people. People walking and leaning and playing ball and some merely sitting. Everything, whirling by now in tiny glimpses. Lars tried to force his eyes shut, but could not. He looked. He looked at everything and pressed his tongue against his teeth so the Feeling would stay small in his mind. But the meadows were yards now, and they were no longer quiet. They moved like everything in them moved. And the people in the automobiles, laughing and honking and resting their elbows out the windows. When he saw the girl on the bicy- cle, Lars managed to pull his eyelids down. "Oh, such a beautiful day, Lars! Everyone is going to the carnival. See them!" "Yes, Papa." The car turned a comer. "Different than all alone in a cold room, eh, my son? But, see — there, there it is! Oh, it's big, like when I went. Look, Lars, this you have never seen!" Lars looked when his eyes had stopped burning. First, there were the cars. Thou- sands and millions of cars parked in lots and on the sides of the highway and wherever there was room, in yards, gasoline stations, the airfield. And then there were the people. So many people, more than there could be in the world! Like ants on a hill, scrambling, walk- ing, moving. Everywhere, cars and people. And beyond, the tents. "Oh, Mama should have come, she should have come. Such a sight!" The old car moved like a giant lob- ster, poking into holes that were too small for it, pulling out from the holes, seeking others, Finally, beneath a big tree in a yard, stopping. Mr. Nielson smiled, opened the back door and pulled the wheelchair from the half-seat. He lifted Lars and put him in the chair and stood for a moment breathing the air and tasting the sounds. "Just like before, only even better! You will enjoy yourself!" Lars tried to feel every rock be- neath the wheels and every blade of grass. He turned his eyes down as far as he could, to see the earth, but he saw his body. The sounds grew louder and as he glided on the smoothness he be- gan to see beyond the crawling, moving people. It all grew louder and Father's voice faster so Lars cut off the Feeling and returned to the bottom of the ocean. The hard-rubber wheels turned softly on nothingness. . . . Heyheyheyhey how about you, Mister? Try your luck, test your skill, only ten cents for three balls. . . . Now I'll count to five, ladies and gentlemen, and if one of you picks the right shell, you win a Kewpie Doll. . . . All right, sir, your weight is one-fifty-three, am I right?. . . . Right this way, folks, see the wonders of the Deep, the dangerous shark and Lulu the Octupus. . . . The Whirlagig, guaranteed to scare the yell out of 46 TWILIGHT ZONE The candy and the peanuts and the little dirty faces. The rides and the planes and the exhibits and the penny arcades. The stale, excited odors and the screaming voices. And the movement, the jerking, zooming, swooping, leaning, pushing, running movement .... you .... Fun, Thrills, and Excitement, only twenty-five cents on the Flying Saucer. . . . Fresh cotton candy. . . . Spooktown, Spooktown, ghosts and dragons and lots of fun, ten cents for adults, a nickel for the kiddies. . . . How about you. Mister?. . . . Lars kept his eyes still, but the Feeling was there. It was small at first and he could think yet of colors and beds that did not move. But it was growing, in the shape of baseballs and bicycles and gigantic leaps, it was growing. Mr. Nielson took his eyes from the iron machine and turned the crank until it clicked. The sign read Secrets of the Harem and Mr. Nielson sighed. He put the huge ball of pink vapor to Lars's mouth and Lars put his tongue about the gritty sweet. 'Ah, ah, ah. You are happy, I can see, already! What shall we do now? The fish, we will look at the fish!" Peculiar gray creatures swimming in dirty water in a big glass tank. "Now you wait here for Papa." Father stuffed into a small box and the box falling fast down a thin track, then up and later down again. Screams and laughter and movement. Movement. "Watch, you see, I'll break the balloon!" Pop! And a plaster doll covered with silver dust and blue paint. Inside for the thrill show of the century, ladies and genetlemen, see Par- mo the Strong Man lift ten times his own weight. . . . A man with a large stomach and moving muscles, pulling a bar with a black ball at either end, hoisting the bar, holding it above his head. Laughs and cheers. Yahyahyahyah! See her now, folks, the most gorgeous, the most beautiful, the most (ahem!) shapely little lass this side of Broadway, Egyptian Nellie, she's got curves on her yahyahyahyah .... "Lars, you wait— no, you don't. It wouldn't be right." The candy and the peanuts and the little dirty faces. The rides and the planes and the exhibits and the penny arcades. The stale, excited odors and the screaming voices. And the move- ment, the jerking, zooming, swooping, leaning, pushing, running movement. Last one there is a sissy, last one there is a sissy. . . . "Good, good, good. Mama should be here! But now we must eat." An open arena, with fluffballs of red and yellow and green hanging from the ceiling. On the floor, popcorn and peanut shells and wadded dirt. CONTINUED ON PAGE 74 TWILIGHT ZONE 47 T he year is 1960. And if you should wander into one of Los Angeles's coffee shops during the late hours of the night, you just might see a group of young men, chain-smoking and drinking black coffee, talking animatedly into the early hours of the morning about life and their art. Chances are, they won't notice you — or anyone else. They might be working on a televi- sion script, or a magazine essay, or dis- cussing whether the girl in the short story on the table before them would really cry like that. One of them, the slim young man with the sandy blond hair, may be leaning over a white writ- ing pad, his black bail-point pen mov- ing across it with swift, dark strokes, as the others watch him with total concen- tration. The man's name is Charles Beau- mont. And this coffee shop is, in a very real sense, a part of the Twilight Zone. Beaumont, and the other writers who gather here, including George Clayton Johnson, William F. Nolan, John Tomerlin, and Jerry Sohl, will soon make a major contribution to The Twi- light Zone's enduring magic, creating such classic episodes as "Perchance to Dream," "Nothing in the Dark," "Living Doll," and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You." But the influence of these late-night sessions extends far beyond one television program. Along with Richard Matheson, Chad Oliver, Ray Russell, and the group's early mentor, Ray Bradbury, these writers are part of what Los An- geles Times critic Robert Kirsch calls "The Southern California School of Writers"— a remarkable confluence of talent that produced an astonishing body of work in print and on screen. Beaumont and his circle had a pro- found effect on the development of fan- tastic film and fiction in the decades that followed. Tall, lean, and bespectacled, Charles Beaumont was always full of a thou- sand ideas and a thousand projects, and approached them all with fantastic energy. By 1960, he was already an es- tablished writer. He'd published dozens of short stories and essays, and several books, sold a number of screenplays to such shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Naked City, Thriller, and Wanted: Dead or Alive. And when Rod Serling's Twilight Zone made its net- work debut in 1959, Beaumont became one of its principal writers, scripting over twenty of its one hundred fifty-six episodes. He was often so busy he would enlist the help of his friends to A LOOK BACK AT THE BRILLIANT WRITER WHO BROUGHT A SPECIAL MAGIC TO THE TWILIGHT ZONE AND INSPIRED A GENERATION OF TALENTED YOUNG SCREENWRITERS. Special thanks are due to Christopher Beaumont and William F. Nolan for the use I of photographs from their collections in I conjunction with this article. RANKER ARTICLE BY ROGE TWILIGHT ZONE 49 IT Beaumont George Clayton Johnson: BEING TAKEN TO THE BEACH "We had this business we called 'being taken to the beach.' It worked best when there were about four of us. I remember once, on the way back from a road racing trip. Chuck and Helen Beaumont, John and Wilma Tomerlin, Bill Nolan and myself were talking and we got into an analytical mood where we were discussing somebody's flaws. And Helen stopped us at it and said that it was like being taken to the beach for the purpose of being drowned. After that we started referring to it as 'being taken to the beach.' You'd be warned: 'We're going out. We've all decided we're taking you to the beach, George.' And I'd say, 'Yeah, okay. Fine.' And you'd spend four or five hours driving up and down the beach or through town or wherever, while three guys told you what was wrong with you. But you have to understand, we weren't setting out with an objective to destroy; we were setting out with an objective to heal. "Around this time, I was having some strong opinions about fiction and television and what art was about. And John Tomerlin was writ- ing for the Lawman series and Beau- mont was writing for Twilight Zone and Have Cun, Will Travel and some other shows, and I'd sold only a cou- ple of short stories. So Chuck said, It's all right for you to have all these high-flown literary opinions about what's good and what isn't and put us down for being whores in the video business, but then you've got to prove that you can do it better, show us what you're talking about here or we can't take you seriously.' "I went home and started writing that night. Within a week or two, I was selling 'A Penny for Ypur Thoughts' to Twilight Zone. Nothing would have galvanized me to do it, except that Beaumont finally stopped treating me as though I really were wise and said, 'George, after all, you haven't done it.' He softened it, but ultimately it's: Hey, man, put your money where your mouth is.' That really proved to be the turning point in my career." complete the assignments. So those late-night coffee shop meetings were more than just social gatherings. They were part business meeting, part brainstorming session, part writing workshop, and part group therapy session. "We were a group of young men who were interested in talking to each other," recalls George Clayton Johnson, "in deep sincerity and emotionalism, about God-knows-what: How to write a story, how to get ahead, arguing the merits of various racing drivers or com- posers, arguing about an old movie, telling each other our story ideas or reading our stories out loud. And a lot of it was just simple conversation." In many ways, Charles Beaumont was the group's focal point, its "electric center." "Chuck was like the hub of a wheel," explains William F. Nolan, one of Beau- mont's earliest friends. "And you had all these different spokes going out: Richard Matheson, John Tomerlin, George Clay- ton Johnson, Chad Oliver, Ray Russell, Rod Serling, Frank Robinson, Harlan Ellison, myself. Spokes. All connected to Beaumont. He energized us. Fired us. Made us stretch our creative and writ- ing muscles. He was always encourag- ing us to do better. It was a very stimulating period in our lives." Won Over by Writing The man who would become known as Charles Beaumont was bom Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago on January 2, 1929, and grew up on that city's North Side. Of his early childhood, he wrote, "Football, baseball, and dime-store cookie thefts filled my early world, to the exclusion of Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, Dr. Doolittle, and even Bull- finch. The installation by my parents of library wallpaper' in the house ('A room-full of books for only seventy cents a yard!') convinced me that literature was on the way out anyway, so I lived in illiterate contentment until laid low by spinal meningitis. This forced me to less strenuous forms of entertainment. I discovered Oz; then Burroughs; then Poe — and the jig was up. Have been reading ever since, feeling no pain." An only child, young Charlie Nutt was very sensitive about his name. He once expressed to boyhood acquain- tance Frank M. Robinson his hatred for the continuous teasing he'd endured: "The kids in school would ask 'Is your father some kind of a nutT" He later changed his name to McNutt, but when that didn't satisfy the situation, he changed it finally, legally, to Beaumont. 50 TWILIGHT ZONE At age twelve, midway through his two-year bout with meningitis, Beau- mont's parents sent him to what they considered to be a better climate. It was not a normal living situation for a young boy. "I lived with five widowed aunts who ran a rooming house near a train depot in, the state of Washington," he told the San Diego Union. "Each night we had the ritual of gathering around the stove and there I'd hear the stories about the strange deaths of their husbands." Beaumont's early illness, and that long period of childhood isola- tion, contributed to the macabre flavor of his later work. During this time, Beaumont also published his own fan magazine, Uto- pia, and soon became an avid fan of science fiction, writing letters to almost every magazine of the genre. In an interview, Beaumont described his early adulthood this way: "Studied piano for six years, decided [I] couldn't squeak by owing to immensely talented right hand and nowhere left. Joined Army before graduating high school, left Army sadder, wiser. Took up art, illus- trated magazines, did cartoons, decided I was great faker but lousy artist, gave it up. Tried acting, star ascended like lead dirigible. Quit acting. Got mar- ried. Attempted short story, sold it, did another, got it rejected, did another — finally found what I had been looking for. Have been writing [ever since], no intention of quitting." A Passion for Words In the summer of 1946, Beaumont met twenty-six-year-old Ray Bradbury in a Los Angeles book store and began talk- ing about his comic collection. Out of that beginning, a friendship blossomed. Bradbury began to read Beaumont's stories and quickly became a major in- fluence. "When I read the first one, I said, 'Yes. Very definitely. You are a writer', " recalls Bradbury. "It showed immediately. Chuck's talent was obvi- ous from that very first story." As Beaumont's early writing brought him little more than rejection slips, he worked at a number of odd jobs. While working briefly as a railroad clerk in Mobile, Alabama, Beaumont met Helen Broun. They were married soon after- ward, and their first child, Christopher was bom in 1950. It was while Beaumont was work- ing as a tracing clerk for California Motor Express that he met John Tomer- lin. When the two discovered they shared a passion for words (as well as a skill for getting out of work), they quickly cultivated what was to become , : S % L# I Group” in the early 1950s. Left to right: Chad Oliver, Beaumont (with bottles), Richard Matheson, and William F. Nolan . a lifelong friendship. In 1951, Beaumont made another special friendship when he met the young struggling writer Richard Mathe- son. As their careers grew, the two act- ed as spurs to one another. "He and I — in a very nice way, of course— were very competitive," says Matheson (who, in addition to many screenplays, tele- during the early Fifties, but meeting with little success. Ray Bradbury recalls: "I was at Universal in 1952 on my very first screen project. It Came From Outer Space, and Chuck, coin- cidentally, was working there in the music department, handling a multilith machine, copying the musical scores. I would see him and have lunch with plays, and short stories, is known for him there at the studio and encourage works such as I Am Legend and The him. Tlyse were hard years for him; he Shrinking Man). 'At first, I was a little ahead of him in sales. But he caught up to me." By the time The Twilight Zone Robert Kirsch: A CALIFORNIA OF THE MIND debuted, Beaumont and Matheson had firmly established themselves in both television and prose, having produced a prodigious and varied body of imagina- tive, skillfully written and — perhaps most important— experimental stories. Yet, as close as Beaumont and Mathe- son were as friends and writers, their personalities could not have been more different. Beaumont's stories often re- flect his interests and concerns: speed and racing, jazz and music, the dark side of character, the bite of satire. Says Matheson, "Our stories sort of showed the way we lived and thought. I stayed home a lot. I was a homebody and I'm still a homebody. Fortunately, the ideas that I've gotten were sort of unusual. But then I would immediately place them in a home situation. The neighborhood situation. Whereas Chuck would get these incredible ideas and they could take place anywhere and in any way. He was much more unlimited in his thinking." "When I speak of a Southern Califor- nia school, I am referring to one source of Beaumont's material," says Robert Kirsch, the first major critic to identify the importance of Beaumont and his circle. "A writer, if he has identity and authenticity, as Beaumont does, is produced by the contrasting interaction between a discernible envi- ronment and the special, individual vision which is his. "This discernible area is Southern California (of the mind even more than geography): new, illusory, ex- perimental, the land of sports cars and movies, speed and special effects. Above all it is the terrain of imagina- tion where the writer does not have the rooted, haunted past, it is the present which provides his sustenance. "Perhaps that is why the settled East and the decaying South have not produced the special quality of fanta- sy which is Southern Californian." Beaumont was writing feverishly TWILIGHT ZONE 51 Beaumont William F. Nolan: terror IN THE PARKING LOT "One night, after Beaumont and I had gone to a late-night horror movie, we came out of the Wiltern Theater and walked across the street to get into my car, which was in the parking lot of one of the big stores on Wilshire. "We were very hyped up, talking about the horror film we'd just seen and about other horrors — real-life horrors. Chuck was just fascinated with that kind of thing. "When we got to the parking lot, we found that one other car -in this entire big lot — was parked right next to mine. It was about two in the morning. The other car had a figure sitting in it, slumped against the wheel, and kind of staring. The figure was either dead or pretending to be dead or was drunk or asleep or was just waiting for somebody. We didn't know what to make of it. Normally, you would just walk up to your car, quietly get in and drive away. That's what normal people would do. Beau- mont began to construct this thing as we stood on the sidewalk, looking to- ward the lot. 'Okay,' he said, and be- gan to count with his fingers. 'The man could be, one, a corpse. And if he is a corpse, I don't want anything to do with it. I don't know about you, but I don't.' I said, 'No, no. I don't want anything to do with a corpse.' 'Or, two, he's some kind of madman pretending to be asleep and ready to go for us the minute we get to that door.' I said, 'Well, that's very unlike- ly.' Unlikely, yes,' he said. 'But not im- possible. Why would he park right next to us? The only car in a lot that can hold three hundred cars?' I said, 'That's a good point.' 'Maybe, the guy is a normal man who's fallen asleep waiting for his wife.' I said, 'That's probably the case.' 'Exactly,' he said. 'But are you willing to risk your life on that?' I said, 'No.' So we left the car and took a bus home. "It would start out tongue-in- cheek, but Chuck had a compelling ability to convince you of things. He had that quiet way of simply laying out this scenario that probably we'd be fine — except that if we weren't we'd be killed. It sounds strange, but you just had to know Beaumont, and the way he could lay these things out." didn't want to be in the music depart- ment doing all this 'stupid' work. He wanted to write." When he was fired from Universal in June of 1953, Beaumont took the plunge into full-time writing. He was twenty-four, married, and had a family to support. (They would have four chil- dren in all, Chris, Catherine, Elizabeth, and Gregory.) By late 1953 the Beaumonts were in disastrous financial shape. "Chuck's typewriter was in hock and the gas had been shut off in their apartment," says Bill Nolan (co-author of Logan's Run). "I remember Beaumont breaking the seal and turning it back on; Chris re- quired heat, and damn the gas company! Chris got what he needed." Nolan had met Beaumont briefly, in 1952 at Universal, when they were introduced by Ray Bradbury. "I recall Chuck's sad face and ink-stained hands. The first Beaumont story had already appeared (in Amazing Stories) and within a few more months, when I saw him again, half a dozen others had been sold. Our friendship was immedi- ate and lasting. 1 found, in Chuck, a warmth, a vitality, an honesty, and depth of character which few possess. And, more necessary, a wild, wacky, irreverent sense of humor." In February 1954, Beaumont and Nolan began writing comics for Whit- man Publications, where they helped to "guide the destinies of such influential literary figures as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Andy Panda." Finally, in September of that year, Beaumont's first major sale, "Black Country," appeared in Playboy. Equally adept at fiction and non-fiction, Beau- mont soon penned a large body of short fiction, nostalgic essays, and personali- ty profiles for the magazine. Outstand- ing among them is the essay "Chaplin," which won him their Best Article Award, and "Black Country," a ten-thousand- word novella about a terminally ill jazzman. Ray Russell ( Playboy's editor during the 1950s, and author of many works of fiction, including Incubus and Sardonicus) considers "Black Country" the best story Playboy ever bought. "Beaumont manages to set up a rhythm and sustain a pitch, a concert pitch - to use a musical term — and sustain that from the very beginning to the very end, says Russell. "It almost never relaxes. You're on a beat throughout the entire story until whhh, it's over. There are very few stories that have that, by Beaumont or anybody else." Playboy soon placed Beaumont on a five-hundred -dollar monthly retainer for first refusal rights to his manu- scripts, and later listed him as a con- tributing editor. Beaumont had reached the turning point in his career. The Fast Track By the mid-Fifties, Beaumont's stories began to appear in the most prestigious magazines in the nation, including Esquire, Collier's, and The Saturday Evening Post. 1954 also marked the be- ginning of his career in television when, in April, his teleplay "Masquerade" aired on Four Star Playhouse. In the years to follow, he would write a num- ber of scripts, many in collaboration with Richard Matheson. "For a year or two, we wrote together on all sorts of projects: Have Gun Will Travel, Buck- skin, Philip Marlowe, The D.A.’s Man. Real crap, most of it," says Matheson, laughingly. "But it was fun, because we had never done this before. But eventu- ally we decided that we really didn't need to collaborate, and chose to go our own ways." Beaumont's entry into television, coupled with his success at Playboy, soon enabled him to participate in what was to become a new and exciting hobby — auto racing. In February 1955, Beau- mont and Nolan attended their first sports car race and the sport instantly became one of the great fascinations of their lives— a fascination that quickly included John Tomerlin as well. The trio could soon be found at- tending and competing in weekend rac- ing events on the West Coast, and writ- ing voluminously for motoring journals such as Road & Track and Sports Car Illustrated. (Beaumont and Nolan also edited two thick books on the subject. Omnibus of Speed and When Engines Roar.) Of their racing abilities, Nolan says: "We weren't great, by any means, but we were fairly good, fairly fast, and to- tally crazy— which means we weren't afraid of anything." Beaumont's first short fiction col- lection, The Hunger and Other Stories (G.R Putnam's Sons) was released in April of 1957 to favorable reviews. Other collections soon followed, in- cluding, Yonder: Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Bantam, 1958) and Night Ride and Other Journeys (Ban- tam, 1960). Though he employed many writing styles, the distinct Beaumont "signature" was always in evidence. "His writing was brisk and very terse," says Bradbury. "There's a great similarity to John Col- lier. Collier rubbed off on him, just as Collier rubbed off on me. And it was all to the good: good, short, to the point, imaginative storytelling. A lot of us are Collier's indirect sons, but you learn, as the years pass, to shake the in- fluence. But it's certainly there. I also see carry-overs from my work in Chuck. It's inevitable, because we were around each other so much. I told him about Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Por- ter. I think that also shows. And it's all to the good." Into the Twilight Zone By 1958, Beaumont had gotten screen- writing credits on a number of televi- sion series. But it was on a project uni- quely suited to his fantastic imagination that Beaumont would achieve his widest recognition. Although television had proved it- self capable of producing distinguished, high-quality drama on such anthology programs as Kraft Television Theater and Playhouse 90, most network programming was an endless string of westerns, situation comedies, and police dramas. But in 1959, Rod Serling, who had written Emmy-winning teleplays for those anthology series, announced that he was going to create a new kind of television series —The Twilight Zone. "This is something I've wanted to do for years," said Serling in an inter- view at the time. "Television hasn't touched it yet. Sure, there have been science fiction and fantasy shows be- fore, but most of them were involved with gadgets or leprechauns. The Twi- CONTINUED ON PAGE 76 TWILIGHT ZONE 53 YOUR THREE MINUTES ARE UP ■ BY GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON ■ I have become increasingly aware of the briefness of life. Sitting here in this improvised workroom in my little home in Pacoima, late at night after the family has gone to bed, touching this battered portable, I remember only yesterday when the typewriter was new and I wanted so desperately to be a published writer of short stories like my friend Charles Beaumont. It was like a crazy need. Writing is a lonely business. It tends to make you reclusive. Because it is difficult to concentrate, to get lost in the work while others are around, more and more you seek a place to be alone. When I used to hang around with the Group, learning to be a writer, little did I know that I would spend so many solitary hours at night dreaming. God knows, I'd rather be down the hall in the bedroom cuddled up with Lola than here in the workroom trying to build a story so that Lola and I can earn the money necessary to keep the bills paid, to feed us and allow us to be together. Even after all these years we are still best friends who can't be in the same room without plunging into earnest conversation, with both of us talking as fast as we can. Only a closed door stops the avalanche of eager words that continually pass between us. I've taken to working late at night, after she has gone to bed and the world has quieted down, alone in what was once a spare bedroom, trying to fit together just those words on paper that might excite an editor and eventually bring in the money we need. The only way to survive is to write stories that sell. Which is why I was in my workroom at three in the morning, lost in language, when the telephone rang. I grabbed it to keep it from waking Lola, aware of the lateness of the hour and apprehensive because calls this late often portend trouble. "Hello?" I said. A woman with a telephone company voice said, "This is the Special Operator. I have a person-to-person call for George Clayton Johnson." I wondered what kind of trouble it was. "This is George." Click-buzz and I heard her saying from farther away, "I have your party on the line, sir. One moment . . Another click and the woman was gone. Then I heard a voice saying: "Hello, George. I thought I might catch you now. I know you like to work at night." The voice was warm and familiar. It was the voice of Charles Beaumont. ^ ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES STONEBRAKER I never realized, when II was hanging around with the Group, that writers spend so many solitary hours at night dreaming. That’s w hat I was doing at three in the morning, when the telephone rang — .JfpMn fjj ^ /m m I Mmk |Rm TWILIGHT ZONE 55 5 , rr THREE MINUTES “It’s only while you’re on E^rth that you get your three wishes/’ said Beaumont’s voice. “If you have the will to reach for them.” "I hope I'm not interrupting any- thing important. I thought if you weren’t too busy we could talk for a few minutes." I felt the hair go up on my spine. Charles Beaumont has been dead more than twenty years. "Who is this?" I said, suspicious. I could feel myself suddenly becoming angry. "It is I," the familiar voice intoned solemnly. "It is only and merely I, but let's not waste time. I have a lot of questions to ask— firstly, how's the Group? Have you seen them lately7" My God. Whoever was doing him had all Chuck's inflections down pat. Abruptly I felt cold, aware of the night. I heard the faint tinkle of ice in a glass. A thought crossed my mind: Do they serve alcohol in Heaven? "This isn't funny," I said. "Not at all." "George," said Beaumont's voice with a note of disappointment, "I had expected you to be quicker." I found myself wanting to prove how quick I could be. Beaumont always had that effect on me. "Okay, Chuck," I said tightly. "I'll go along with the gag. So here we are in the Twilight Zone. How are things at your end? Is it the standard Heaven?" "Not exactly," he said. "That's why I called." Now, I thought, here's where we find out what this is all about. "Tell me more." "The Greater Truth is that one man's Heaven is another man's Hell." Knowing how much English he could put on things, I said, "Give it to me with the bark off." "It's exactly the way I imagined it would be. Everything is perfect. There is not a discordant note. There is never any waiting and no one disputes any- thing I say. Do you see the implica- tions?" he asked sharply. "I read that a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?" I said, trying to understand. "Exactly," said Beaumont's voice somberly, and then, brightening, added, "but it's my turn. What about Burt Shon- berg? What is his latest stuff like?" "He died, Chuck," I said, reminded of the brilliant artist whose luminous paintings had enlightened us all. "Oh. I didn’t know." The sound of the words chilled my blood. "Chuck, I said. "Burt was one of the good guys. Haven't you seen him around7" "No," he said. I sat stunned, thinking. My Father's house has many mansions. 'And the Group7 Are they still living?" "Yes." I could hear relief in his voice. And do you still take each other to the beach7" I remembered those night-long ses- sions of naked encounter and mutual psychiatry with the four of us jammed into Chuck's new Volkswagen. We would drive along the seacoast or hunch together over steamy coffee cups in an all-night diner to thresh out the problems of the world while pointing out each other's flaws, stripping away the falseness. For Chuck they were fun, but for me those confrontations were often nightmares as I defended myself against self-satisfied challengers: John, who figured out how he should feel before becoming emotional, with visions of himself as a no-nonsense executive with a taste for the finer things in life; Bill, who would kid his way out, the willing focus of Chuck's jokes who never forgot or misplaced anything, determined to make a living from writ- ing, any kind of writing, happy when the heat wasn't on him; and Chuck Beaumont, keeping things moving with his aggressive manner and willingness to go first, somehow knowing that he was bulletproof, that he was the master of verbal judo who was living a charmed life. Among us. Chuck was the authori- ty on writing. He had written The Hunger and Other Stories, had already published his first hardcover novel, was selling regularly to slick magazines like Play- boy and was being sent to the studios on interviews by his Hollywood agent, Malcolm Stewart of the Ingo Preminger Agency on Sunset. He was a proven success. Bill was selling stories and articles to the men's magazines. John had been taken on by the Harold Matson Agency in New York and there was talk of a book contract. I didn't have an agent. All I had sold was an original movie script for peanuts and after several years it looked as though it would never be produced. All of my attempts to write short stories had come back again till I was blind to their faults. Baffled by the problem, I had taken to procrastinating while I figured out the secret, studying Chuck and the others for clues on how the magic act was done. Was it the neatly typed pages, typed and re-typed to perfection? Was it the charm, the 56 TWILIGHT ZONE personality, the telephone manner? Was it connections? Was it luck? Chuck insisted it was work, and that was echoed by the others. He talked a lot about forcing himself to sit in the chair. He would put a piece of paper in the typer and make himself stay there even if the words wouldn't come. He said it was the way he got that trance state where he forgot him- self and became the work. He had adopted a schedule and stuck to it, which wasn’t my way. That's what I'd quit my job to avoid. So all too often I'd find myself backed into an uncomfortable corner by all three of them at once; forced to admit that, measured by my progress, I could be wrong. I was there to learn, wasn't I? Somehow it was different when it was Chuck who was outflanked. He would smile warmly at us and thank us for straightening him out while praising us for our insights into his self- delusions. Yes, I remembered those enlighten- ing torture sessions we called "being taken to the beach." "No," I said. "We haven't been to the beach in years." "Why not?" Chuck's voice sounded dismayed. "It appeared to me that you liked and admired each other." "Sure," I said, "but you were the center. You must have known that the Group would pull apart without you. Oh, not at once. Bill and I wrote a fair- ly successful book together but it turned out that the big attraction be- tween us was you. We spent our time together, waiting. "You'd lock yourself away, working on something while we'd wait for you to come out and play. We'd see each other from time to time, but the day would come when you'd finish the script or the story and you'd be back again. Then the Group would come alive. That was when you, tired of soli- tude, would want excitement. The min- ute you'd come out of the office of yours with the manuscript under your arm you'd call one of us on the phone and he'd come running, maybe picking up somebody on the way. You knew how to orchestrate these things so we'd all end up at your place to talk and lis- ten to the hi-fi or pile into a car and go for a drive . . . "It was your group. Chuck. With- out you to center on, we simply discov- ered that we all lived in different worlds. When John Donne wrote, "No man is an island,' he was mistaken. We may share the Earth but each man is a universe of his own creation. His dreams. His lusts. His needs. Every man is a god who has forgotten his divinity." "Exactly," said the voice of Charles Beaumont. "That's why it's so important that you call the others. Get them back together again. It's only while you're on Earth that you get your three wishes — if you have the will to reach for them. It's magic interacting with the throng. There are dangers, of course. It's easy to forget yourself and get lost in all the exciting activity, to be caught up in the world . . . but you must not avoid it, either. "Call them, George. Get the Group together. Don't let them drift out of your life. "Hug them to you. "Cling to them. "Pray for them. "Cherish them. "Didn't you know that if each of us lives in his own world, he also lives in his own Heaven7 "It gets very lonely when the others aren't around. . .George, hurry. There is only so much time. Infinity is only a heartbeat long. Eternity is now. For God's sake, wake up. . .!" There was suddenly a click-buzz on the phone and I heard the colorless voice of the Special Operator. "I'nf sorry to disconnect you, sir, but your three minutes are up." Far off, away, I thought I heard an anguished cry. Then the familiar dial tone. I fumbled the phone back into the cradle and sat there for a moment, thinking. I could see what he meant about there not being enough time. I wanted to tell him that though he was right about not letting the friendship die, I couldn't suddenly stop working and call John and Bill. If I could simply stop what I'm do- ing, the first thing I'd do is go down the hall to the bedroom where my wife, Lola, lies sleeping. Don't you understand. Chuck, it isn't only the money to pay the bills? There is a Greater Truth. Don't you know that when you were alone in your office writing those stories, you were touching more people more deeply with the quality of your mind and thoughts than you ever could in a car driving along a beach with three guys? And don't you see why I couldn't leave the workroom until I finished this story? ■ TWILIGHT ZONE 57 RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN LABBE Exhibit A: two beautiful people frozen forever on celluloid. But this time the camera has caught some- thing they never meant to reveal. . . . They met at this very strange party in Malibu. The house was Moorish design and a heavy industry crowd sat on tubby Road To Morocco pillows, danced, snorted, and lied to each other as perfect surf supplied a metronome. She was an actress, studying at one of the local academies and getting in for Equity-waiver auditions. He was. . .she wasn't sure. She asked him and he dropped two new cubes into her vodka-tonic and said: "I work when I feel inspired." They stood by the bar's open glass door, watching the ocean foam, and his white scarf was suddenly stolen by night wind, flying into the blackness; a ghostly serpent. She stared into his dark eyes, and he touched her cheek, asking if she was alone. An hour later they walked on the beach, and were soon laughing, celebrating having found each other at such a dull party. He was a world traveler named Gregory and she liked his sense of humor, though he preferred not to talk about himself; still, as they crunched through moist sand, she managed to learn he'd been married, loved dogs, and knew the address of every great restaurant in Paris. She told him she'd never been to Paris. At nine-thirty sharp, a screening of The African Queen began in the plush liv- ing room which rose over a mirror tide and she sat beside him, nibbling crackers and sharing funny secrets. Now and then, during the film, she would peek over at him and he'd smile, making her feel pleasingly like a child; like he watched her as a father might, tak- ing his little girl to her first movie. As Humphrey Bogart's stomach grumbled and Katherine Hepburn glared politely, the two new friends held hands and she looked over, aching to touch him; to feel him. At two a.m., guests began to yawn and sleepy, stoned-out couples hugged the host, saying it was the best party they'd ever been to. He was a tanned studio sul- tan and kissed their cheeks and smiled, though it was impossible to tell if he be- lieved every word or memorized which faces deceived him. That was when Gregory asked to drive her home. She was thrilled, feigned reluctance, and said she couldn't impose. But when he threw an arm around her ^ TWILIGHT ZONE 59 They waited for the red light te signal them, made funny faces as the machine exploded light, bleaching them morgue white. and whispered a joke in her ear, she laughed and grabbed her purse. They took his Mercedes 500 SL and streaked down Pacific Coast Highway, listening to Z.Z. Top's Afterburner al- bum cranked to a million watts, laughing like insane teenagers. The top was down and their hair was pulled into Dracula tightness by cool winds as the Mercedes purred through fog and he reached over, pulling her closer. Ahead, they could see a fuzzy necklace of lights that stretched down the throat of the coastline, fifty miles worth, lighting the way. "Beautiful," she said, watching the wipers arm-wrestle mist. He slid his electric window down and wind swirled his hair into a tidepool as they ran a red light and sped south toward her apartment in Brentwood. That's when they saw it. A traveling carnival. It was stand- ing in the parking lot of the Malibu Colony Market and their faces were awash in pink and green neon as they drove in and stared at the huge pendu- lum rockets that had screams pouring from spinning tips. He killed the engine, did some lines of blow with her and ran warm fingers across her cold face. She touched her lips to his salty palm and gently tasted it, as a cage full of monkeys shrieked in the distance. You taste good, she said, words carried from her mouth on visible breath, like a comic-book character whose ideas emerge in a balloon. They wandered through the sour smells of the carnival, drinking blue slush and watching an elephant with sad eyes stand on one foot. And when they threw Ping-Pong balls into empty aquariums, he won her a small goldfish, which she accepted like it was a dia- mond. She carried it in a baggie and it swam and stared at them, dangling in her perfectly manicured hand. They strolled near a giant ferris wheel and were drawn by pulsing bulbs that guarded the portal to the Coin Arcade. Inside, on a lake of sawdust, they had their fortunes told by "Madame Destiny" who stared, frozen, until she was slipped a token, then came alive, mechanical face tensing with worry. She told them both to beware of strang- ers, then lifted a Mona Lisa smile and said evil thoughts couldn't be hidden. After more trance sounds, which she hummed ominously, the seer became stiff again, suddenly dead, eyes closing, paint- ed hands lifeless over the chipped crys- tal ball. They thanked her with amused smiles and walked on, seeing a row of photo booths, ratty curtains half- drawn. On each was stenciled: Four Photos - 50c. "I have a little more change," he said, sliding fingers into his pants pock- et. She said she was game and tapped at her goldfish as its features bulged curiously. They barely fit inside the third booth and she told him it reminded her of an old Marx Brothers movie she once saw where a ridiculous number of peo- ple crammed into a tiny stateroom. He said he'd never seen that one and worked on spinning the piano-type stool higher. "You think it wants to have its pic- ture taken?" She was staring at the tiny, wriggling creature in the baggie and puckering her lips, smiling protectively. Somehow she and Gregory man- aged to finaEy get in position and as she sat on his lap, he dropped in two coins. They waited for the red light to signal them and when it did, they made funny faces as the machine buzzed and exploded light in their faces, bleaching them morgue white. The groaning booth recorded their four poses in under thirty seconds: one with no expression, the second with tongues out, the third with crossed eyes and crazy smiles, the last with them kissing and her holding the fish up proudly, as if it were a newborn child. When it was done, they laughed and freed themselves from the booth, waiting outside for the photos. But they never came. They waited ten minutes. Twenty. And finally they walked away impatient- ly, passing Madame Destiny and wish- ing her a good life. She seemed to move in the blinking colors of the arcade, head turning slightly inside the glass box, eyes flashing dread. The two of them bought tickets for the House of Mirrors and as they dis- appeared into its maze of lawless reflec- tions, a small boy eating a chili dog walked by the photo booth. He heard a developing sound and watched as a nar- row strip of photos slipped from the booth into a corroded metal catch. He took the photos and peered at them curiously, biting into his chili dog. In the first exposure was an expression- less young couple, in the second the woman looked scared and the man hos- tile. In the third, she looked terrified and he had a look of darkening imbal- ance. In the last exposure, the man looked satisfied while the woman looked dead, her throat slit wide, eyes glassy. The boy searched for the couple to give them the photos, but only found a baggie with a dead goldfish in it as he stood in the empty lot of the market. ■ 60 TWILIGHT ZONE o T D M N S I O N S THE NEW DINOSAURS I 'm late for my interview with Dougal Dixon. I’d arranged to meet him at New York's venera- ble Algonquin Hotel, a place laden with history. I step off the elevator, buzz the bell breathlessly. A bearded man, younger than I'd expected, opens the door. I apologize profusely for my tardiness. He seems surprised. "I hadn't noticed the time," he says. It fits. To the man perched in the faded chair across from me, a few minutes matter no more than the decades of histo- ry this grand hotel has witnessed. For Dougal Dixon has a passion for dinosaurs. "I tend to think of things in terms of millions of years," says Dixon, "Tens of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years." He is so intrigued by dinosaurs that he has created a world in which they never died out and brought it to life in a book called The New Dinosaurs, published by Salem House. In a series of frighteningly realistic full-color draw- ings by a team of artists, he shows us "new" dinosaurs that resemble ostriches, giraffes, and even whales, as well as dinosaurs that look like nothing that's ever lived on earth. "To put it in a science fiction context," says Dixon, "the best thing to do is to imagine a parallel universe in which the extinction of dinosaurs had not taken place. And if we could jump from our universe into that universe, this is what we would be looking at." Dixon leans forward in his chair, and chuckles quietly from time to time during the interview, rubs his chin, then leans back in his chair, looking out the window. I get the feeling he'd rather be working on his next book, or on one of the models for his creatures. Still, he thinks hard about my questions, giving them his most carefully considered response. Would dinosaurs have evolved intelligence? "Human in- telligence as we understand it is only one possible kind of in- telligence," says Dixon. "It has yet to prove itself as having any long-term advantage for the species. Some of the dinosaurs were a lot more 'intelligent' than we give them credit for, but it was of the sort that provided a more effi- cient hunting style, a means of finding food more easily than their competitors." So there are no humanoid dinosaurs in The New Dinosaurs. One scans its pages in vain looking for a tyrannosaurus riding a Harley or a stegosaur wearing homrims and listening to Coltrane. Do I detect a bias against humans? 'Animals have always been more interesting, to me, than people," he admits. "The wildlife we're seeing today isn't a natural ecosytem at all, be- cause of the influence humans have on the system. Human beings are the joker in the deck." But isn't he worried about the state of the planet, and our future on it? "I do not belong to any preservation group or environmental pressure group or anything like that," says Dixon. "Largely it is because I tend to look at things over a very long time span. I'm an optimist. If we wipe out some species— or even ourselves— what is the result going to be in five or ten million years time7 Once we are gone, whatever is left will continue to evolve and develop, and take the places of things we have wiped out." It's a grand vision. But personally. I'm hoping the human race stays in the picture a little while longer. ■ ARTICLE BY JENNIFER STEINHAUER TWILIGHT ZONE 61 The Lord had chosen him to destroy the Queen of Darkness. Now, at last, he'd found her, in the heart of the City .... FICTION BY NANCY BAKER ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE WARREN The posters led him to her. They grew along the axis of the city's main streets, planted there by her acolytes. Festooning the walls of construction sites, circling lamp posts, tacked onto trees, they were the signs he used to trace her paths throughout the city. At first, he had barely noticed them. He had been too intent on hunting down another of the sinners he had vowed to eradicate. But when she, too, had played him false, prov- ing, despite extensive examination, to be no more than any other wicked daughter of Eve, the posters had been waiting. He stood before a wall of them now, while the October wind chased leaves in circles at his feet. How could he have missed the signs? She flaunted them like twisted badges of honor; the shock of midnight hair, the eyes black-lined and hellishly bright against the corpse-like pallor of her skin. Even her name — Lilith. The rejected first wife of Adam, cast out of Eden for witchcraft, she had thrown in her lot with the Arch-Deceiver. What woman who was not a witch would choose such a name? They had thought themselves safe, the Daughters of Evil. Thought that in a world of televised carnage and sensual corruption, they could hide. Who would believe in such ancient evil, when modern ones abounded like mushroom clouds? But he had not forgotten. He remembered his Lord's in- junction. It was written down for all to see, even if none would heed it. "Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live." The command was very clear and, clear of mind and con- science, he obeyed it. It was not hard to find the offenders; they advertised their presence freely. Fortune-tellers, dancers, whores, writers of occult pornography, what were they all but manifestations of that one great whore, the first witch? So he had obediently tracked them down and submitted them to the ancient tests:The needles to search out the devil's mark that did not bleed, the racks, the water that would purify them in death. That not all confessed to their crimes had disturbed him at first, as did the incontrovertible evi- dence of innocence the drowned corpses represented. Then he realized that they were mere dupes of the greater evil, bound to it by their sex, if not by their conscious will. They had been set in his path to distract him from his true quarry. After that, the confessions did not matter. The world, of course, did- not understand. The papers, the television, were full of news of his exploits, of how he'd com- pletely baffled the police. What did they expect? He was about his Lord's business; his Lord would protect him. But the words hurt sometimes. Psychopath, maniac, sadist. If they only knew the truth, he knew they'd praise him for his ^ TWILIGHT ZONE 1 , r actions, acknowledge the righteousness of his lonely crusade. Rapist was the word that hurt the most. True, he had fallen, once or twice, tempted beyond resistance by the naked, bruised body spread out before him. But that was their wickedness, not his. How could any man resist for long the wiles of a witch? He had scourged that weakness from himself now, and that printed lie at least had stopped. Yes, the sin was gone, so he had thought. But now, standing before the wall emblazoned with her image, he felt the traitorous stirring in his groin. There could be no doubt now. The weak hu- manity in him knew the lure of her evil, was rising to point it out, for all to see. There could be no clearer sign. He began to track her then, through the cavernous temples where she held her rites. Their very names were infamy to him. . .The Cave, The Pariah Club, Zone Zero. It cost him to pass through those hell-holes untainted. The dark- ness, the sleek bodies in black and sil- ver, even the thunderous, seducfive rum- ble of her music, all had an allure that drew him, even though he could see the corrupt, rotting features of the damned beneath the painted faces and hear the laughter of demons in her soaring voice. As the nights passed, he learned where she lived, what she looked like under her mask. It had surprised him at first, that the Queen of Darkness would look so. . .ordinary. Without the erotic allure of her paint, she was no more than a passably pretty young woman. Then he saw the subtlety of that trap and marveled once again at the infinite, deceptive power of evil. No one, un- masking the witch Lilith, would see the danger in those pale features. And so would turn away, forgetting that they had ever suspected her. Night after night, he watched her whirl about the stage, a lean black der- vish. He listened to her voice wail out over the screaming crowds. Her songs were blasphemy, as wickedly seductive as her lithe body, her black-lipped mouth. She sang of shadows, and demon- lovers, and the power of darkness. Night after night, he followed her home and crouched on the fire escape outside her window, watching the seemingly inno- cent rituals of her life. He could have taken her a thou- sand times, but some voice inside told him the time was not right. This was no simple task he had set himself, this de- struction of the greatest of Evil's whores. When the time came, he would know it. The posters told him, just as they had led him to her. "Special Halloween Midnight Show." The day of All Hallow's Eve dawned cold and gray. He barely noticed; the the anticipation that surged through him made the world a flame in his eyes. All the weeks of waiting and watching would come to an end tonight. And so would his increasing nervousness, the itchy twitch between his shoulder blades that made him feel watched, and kept him away from her fire escape. Tonight, his great duty would be done. What would come after that, he did not know, but he distantly imagined a rapture that would trumpet him to heaven. He was in the club early, pushing his way closer to the front than he had ever dared to go. Tonight he was stronger than all her rituals. Tonight, he was omnipotent. The announcer took the stage at midnight, seizing the microphone and staring down at the costumed crowd. "Good evening," he drawled. "It's Hallow- een. Do you know where your soul is?" The crowd around him surged and howled like the demons whose garb they affected. He knew where his soul was. He could feel it, bright and hun- gry, filling him. "Well, we're going to take it. . .we're going to shake it. . .and we're going to steal it. Because tonight, Zone Zero is proud to present our own Queen of Darkness . . . Lilith and the Nightwalkers!" The lights plunged out and around him he heard the crowd screaming her name. He was screaming too, he real- ized, in challenge. The bass rumble began, then the heavy heartbeat of the drums, the wail of the guitar. Finally, as the music built to an ominous crescendo, came her voice, caressing the darkness. “I’m on the night shift Oh, tonight I’m waiting. . .” He had not imagined she could be more wicked than before— but she was. Her eyes burned like amber flames and her body coiled and uncoiled on stage with savage grace. Her voice was incan- descent. It burned along his nerves, sapping his strength. He found himself swaying and jumping with the tightly- packed crowd and when he tried to fight it, they seemed to laugh and push him closer to the stage. He clung to his resolution, to the memory of the great responsibility with which he had been charged. He chanted the sacred instructions under his breath, a charm to ward off the pull of her voice, her eyes, her body. "This song," she said, in a lull in the cacophony of sound, "is for some- one out there. I know who you are. 1 know what you want." She stared out over the crowd for a moment, then bent her dark head and began to sing. “You hear her singing, with a voice like temptation Like the one you hear in your guignol dreams Painting demons over throbbing drums She’s stealing souls in the steely hum And you know, you know what she really means. . .” She knew, he realized with shock. She knew. Knew he was there, knew his mission, knew his very soul. The thought horrified and revolted him. How could she know? Had she been toying with him all along, sending out her decoys to tempt him, then the pos- ters to draw him to her? “You see her moving like a ser- pent in the garden Like the one that leaves the fire in your veins Just like all the good books say Everyone's gonna thank you someday Cause you know, you know they’re all the same. . .” He tried to turn, to flee that mock- ing, knowing voice, but he could not move, hemmed in by the surging crowd. Fists pounded the air around him, driv- ing him forward. Desperately, he fum- bled in his pocket for his knife, anoint- ed now with holy water and blessed in preparation for the night's work. He clung to it like a talisman. “As you're pulling down the shade You can hear her calling As you’re reaching for the blade You can see her falling Just one touch and she'll be falling, falling, falling Falling for you ...” She repealed the last line over and over, beckoning, cajoling. She was on her knees, calling to him, her voice a promise. He felt his body respond again, felt the rush of fire along his limbs and the heavy heat centering in his groin. "No!" he screamed, above the thun- der of the music "No!" She could not do this to him. He had to make her stop. Had to end her evil now, no mat- ter what the cost. The thin row of people between himself and the stage melted away, then he was alone, scrambling up into the light. In its glare, time seemed to stop. He saw her eyes widen in terror, her mouth open to scream. There were shouts from his right and he half- 64 TWILIGHT ZONE Her songs were blasphemy, as wickedly seductive as her lithe body, her black- lipped mouth. turned to stare into the black barrels of the guns. Distantly, he heard the police- men ordering him to freeze. Why had she called them? he won- dered. This had been between the two of them. Didn't she know that the bat- tle between good and evil must always be fought alone? Betrayed, he turned back to face her. The first bullet shattered his shoul- der, spun him back to take the second through his chest. The din in his ears faded to a buzz of sound and the lights wavered over his head. Dimly, he real- ized he was lying down and couldn't re- member how he'd gotten there. Where was she? He turned his head, his vision narrowing, and found her crouched in the arms of one of the policemen. As the light went out, he thought he saw her smile. Lilith sat on her bed and stared at the red-wrapped bundle in her lap. The candles, melted to mere stubs after their long duty the night before, cast flicker- ing shadows across her face. There was a sound from the street. Out of habit, she avoided glancing at the fire escape outside the shrouded window, where the dark figure had crouched so many nights. She let a long breath sigh out. Living out the routine of her life beneath the heavy weight of that mad gaze had been more draining than she thought, especially after the police had finally admitted the suspect- ed identity of the voyeur. They had managed, even in their self-congratulatory triumph, to remember to reprimand her for not telling them about the song, about her plan to lure the killer into their sights. How long could you have protected me? she had countered. All he had to do was wait. I wanted to end it once and for all. Lilith shifted in her cross-legged stance on the tumbled sheets. She had not made the bed that morning, and the faint scent of sex hung in the air. It was a good thing he hadn't been outside her window last night, she thought, narrow lips quirking a little. Bedding Lieuten- ant Davis had been necessary, but that did not mean she had to find it unpleas- ant. What had followed had been equally necessary and, she reluctantly admitted, strangely more exciting. Slowly, she unwrapped the red silk, one comer at a time. She began to hum, faint, lullaby-like tones that seemed the antithesis «of the wild violence she con- jured up on stage. She drew out, one by one, the objects the red flower in her lap unfurled to reveal. Six bullets, the ones she had taken from Davis's gun the night before and replaced, after proper ritual, with ones she had purchased earlier. One spent shell, marked with symbols in red and black. She stared at the last object for a moment. The cotton doll was clumsily made, features stitched roughly across its face, coarse brown yam for hair. It was hard to create one without a pos- session of the person it was to repre- sent; that was why there had been no room for subtlety in either its appear- ance or its purpose. The method had been crude, but the outcome certain. When she put her finger to the bullet hole in its chest, bits of charred cotton flaked away and clung to her skin. She wondered absently what his name had been. She'd find out, no doubt, when the papers came out the next day. Whoever he was, he'd been right. Righter than he would ever know. Singing softly, Lilith rose and head- ed for the incinerator shaft. ■ TWILIGHT ZONE 65 Fish Tale s A dream date from LINDEMANN’S CATCH. ►URTESY OF UNIVERSAL TEI Part eleve "You KNOW WHAT GROWS FROM OLD LADIES' FINGERS?" ASKS CaM- eron Mitchell in a crazed voice, staring straight into the cam- era. "Old ladies." It's January 5, 1972, and Night Gallery is beginning the last third of its second season in memorable fashion with a little item called "Green Fingers." "That's one people talked about for a long time," said makeup artist Leonard Engelman, whose job it was to make actress Elsa Lanchester look newly grown and uprooted from the garden. "I still hear comment about that. For some rea- son, that's one that people always seem to remember. This episode about a greedy land developer and a little old lady who could grow anything in her garden benefited from an excellent script adaptation by Rod Serling, the typi- cally skilled direction of John Badham, and good perform- ances by the two lead stars, particularly acclaimed actress Elsa Lanchester, well-known for her role as "The Bride of Frankenstein." Badham remembers her as "very wonderful and imaginative and very sweet." He also had good words for Cameron Mitchell, but says that "he was always worrying about this and that and the next thing. He just walked around and worried and worried and worried." Badham had a few worries of his own. "I remember that we were struggling with the budget. We wanted to have this big lush garden and things growing all over everywhere." But for some reason, the site chosen for the location shoot, says z Badham, was "virtually out in the middle of the desert, with m three roses and a cabbage plant sticking up— with virtually no garden at all." Nevertheless, Badham remembers the episode favorably — and was pleased, for a very personal reason, that others do as well. Shortly after finishing work on the series, he met a woman he very much wanted to impress. Without refer- ring to particular titles, he mentioned his work on the series. "When she found out I had been doing Night Gallery, she said, 'Oh! Do you remember the one that had this old wom- an whose fingers grew up out of the ground?' " Badham and the young lady were eventually married. NAME THAT TUNE TWO OTHER EPISODES FOLLOWED "GREEN FINGERS" THAT EVENING. "The Funeral," the story of a vampire staging a second funer- al for himself, featured a script by Richard Matheson and two fine comic performances by Werner Klemperer and Joe Flynn. It suffered, however, from a curious lack of energy in its direction and editing, as well as from too much mugging by the supporting actors (including producer Jack Laird in a cameo appearance). "The Tune In Dan's Cafe," directed by David Rawlins, one of Night Gallery's film editors, was a tale of love, betray- al, and a haunted jukebox which plays only one particular country-western song. Although the show holds the viewer's interest, it's all ultimately a little vague. Nevertheless, the episode struck a chord with the audience — not the story, but the "tune," itself. The appropriately twangy melody was composed by Night Gallery's musical supervisor Hal Mooney, and the lyr- ics were written by one of the script's co-writers, Gerald San- ford. "I wrote one little verse to it," says Sanford. "But Jack [Laird] said to me, 'Look, this is very good. Why don't you write a second verse to it?' I said fine. It took me two minutes to write the first verse, and a minute to write the second verse." Country-western singer Jerry Wallace was then asked to do a quick recording of the song, and "If You Leave Me Tonight, III Cry" made its debut on Night Gallery. It was an instant hit. "The next day," says Sanford, "peo- ple kept calling up [about the song]." Universal saw they had a potential money-maker on their hands, so Jerry Wallace was flown in from Nashville to re-record the song as a single for Universal MCA's Decca Records. larticle by Kathryn M. Drennan & J. Michael Straczynski © 1989 Synthetic Worlds, Ltd. TWILIGHT ZONE 67 ROD SERLING’S NIGHT GALLERY GREEN FINGERS The single entered the country-western charts on July 15, 1972, and stayed there for seventeen weeks, including three weeks at number one. But that wasn't the end of it. Currently, the song is still available on two albums, "Jerry Wallace's Greatest Hits," and "MCA Records —Thirty Years of Hits: 1958-1988." And instrumental versions of the tune have been used on such television programs as CHIPS and Knight Rider, and in the movie Smokey and the Bandit. "I use it constantly," says Gerald, who has gone on to write and develop other projects for Universal after leaving Night Gallery. "I add it in the background, usually. It brings me in about, I don't know, ten thousand dollars a year still. Universal uses it all the time. I get a list on its use from all over the world." THE FLAT MALE On January 12, Night Gallery brought its viewers a Serling fantasy, a pure horror story, and a Laird dark comedy. The comedy was "The Late Mr. Peddington," about a woman shopping for her husband's casket in the aftermath of his fall from a very high balcony. Producer Laird wrote the adaptation from a short story by Frank Sisk called "The Flat Male." In the original story, the woman asks the undertaker about the possibility of purchasing a very wide, very thin casket to accommodate a corpse flattened by a fall. That par- ticular detail was ultimately cut from the script and the name was changed; but when artist Tom Wright was working on the painting the episode was still called "The Hat Male." "I took 'The Flat Male' literally," recalls Wright. "It was a flat drawing, almost like a steamroller had rolled over this guy, and you were looking straight down on him lying in the road. That was a weird painting." Serling seems to have agreed with that assessment for the painting and the episode. "Not the most appetizing of scenes," he said in his introduction while standing next to the painting, "not the pleasantest of stories." "The Late Mr. Peddington" is less amusing than Laird in- tended it to be, but the direction, and the acting of Kim Hunter and Harry Morgan, almost carry it off. Morgan was not the first choice for the role of the un- dertaker. "They wanted (Sir John] Gielgud for that," says director Jeff Corey, "but Gielgud had had a lot of playing undertakers. He just thought it was a little too baleful for him. But Harry Morgan was lovely in it. "I liked doing that one. Like most people I find under- taking establishments kind of morbid and captivating. I don't like to look at coffins but I look at them anyway. So, I tried to get as many coffins as I could. You know undertakers generally negotiate with you with the door ajar and [the de- ceased] visible in an open casket, and you just want to run out of the place. Anything you want, yes. Four limousines? You bet.'" OF MICE AND MERMAIDS The horror tale, 'A Feast of Blood," and the Serling fan- tasy, "Lindemann's Catch," were more successful episodes, but both suffered in their climactic moments from less-than- successful special effects. It was the same old problem on both episodes— a limit- ed budget and too little time to get things right. 'A Feast Of Blood" concerns an odd broach that looks like a strange, dead mouse until, by the removal of a pin, it grows into a flesh-eating beast. Somehow director Jeannot Szwarc and a strong cast featuring Norman Lloyd, Sondra Locke, and Her- mione Baddeley make this work pretty well — until the mouse grows to the size of a dog and attacks Sondra Locke. Although Szwarc does not let the camera linger too long on the beast, it is still obvious that the poor actress is wres- tling with a large, unmoving stuffed mouse. It takes a few moments before the episode can recover from this and re- establish its horrific atmosphere for the denouement. The original Serling fantasy that evening was "Linde- mann's Catch," the dark story of a turn-of-the-century fisher- man who catches a mermaid in his net. It is easily the best episode of the evening, and overall one of Night Gallery's better efforts, thanks in part to the fact that Serling's script was not tampered with much by others. Director Jeff Corey, working with cinematographer E. Charles Straumer, managed to turn the back lot of Universal into an atmospheric, fog- laden seaport perfect for the story. And, as usual, Corey elicited strong performances from his cast. He recalls that Anabel Garth, in particular, acted above and beyond the call of duty. "That poor girl who played the mermaid," says Corey, "was out in the cold at three, four in the morning in the driz- zle in the back lot; she got very severe bronchitis after that. I felt just terrible. It's a pity she had no lines." Creating a character who is a fish from the waist down, and a human from the waist up, proved a tricky task for makeup artists Leonard Engelman and John Chambers. First they had to construct a believable fish tail, and then blend the edges of the tail into the actress's skin so that it looked like a natural part of her. In this they were quite successful. But at the show's climax, the mermaid had to be trans- formed into a woman from the waist down, and a fish from the waist up. With limited time and money, Engelman and Chambers did their best. Corey was extremely unhappy with the results. "It just didn't look right," he said. "That's the only time I worked on a Night Gallery episode where we had to do a retake, because it certainly didn't work the first time, and it didn't work the second time. I think technologically they're more advanced now. They start the makeup from the human face and evolve it into a fish. This seemed like a 68 TWILIGHT ZONE ROD SERLING’S NIGHT GALLERY fish laid over [the face]." After the second try, Corey had to let it go. "I was hoping for some miraculous intercession be- tween the lens and what I saw, but of course, it was just dreadful. The lens is absolutely going to pick up what your eyes see." Engelman had to agree. "It wasn't one of our greatest creations." NBC AND A KID FROM YALE Not only did Night Gallery's special effects make for crea- tive problems but also for network problems. Night Gallery associate producer Herbert Wright (no relation to Tom Wright) remembers that since NBC was always worried about anything being too "horrific," special effects often had to be double-checked with network executives. "These days they do anything— you can show people's brains falling out their eyeball and no one [cares] ," says Wright. "But in those days, if you showed a wound that was too deep or too bloody or too gory or whatever— nothing but a scratch compared to what they're doing on film these days — the network would go berserk." Of course, gory effects weren't the network's only con- cerns— they were terrified of anything that might offend peo- ple or confuse them. And, says Wright, since the network ex- ecs "inevitably didn't have a clue what we were doing, and why we were doing it," they were especially worried about Night Gallery. "Herb Schlosser, the NBC exec assigned to the series, didn’t understand fantasy, didn't understand horror, and was totally lost," says Wright. 'And I was the guy who had to go over and explain this week's monster or this week's horror tale and why a [character] is growing out of the grave. I don't know where Herb grew up, but he didn't grow up reading Grimm's fairy tales. He must have grown up reading science manuals or something, because he was very, very literal about the whole thing. "It drove Jack and me and Rod Serling up a tree. Rod would have to make special calls to explain to Herb when I was incapable of convincing him, say, why someone could fall in love with a mermaid. Because [Schlosser would say] ‘There are no mermaids."’ Serling, however, was not supposed to be bothered with these production problems except as a "court of last resort." In general, the job of explaining— and defending— the series fell to Wright. "We had violent fights. I several times left the network and figured that I'd never work again, because of a position that I had to take on behalf of the studio and Jack and Rod on some of the shows." For all the misery dealing with NBC caused Wright, working on Night Gallery was still an exhilarating experience for a young man just a few years out of Yale. "It was my first actual production job in Hollywood," says Wright. "I grew up loving Twilight Zone, and Rod Ser- ling was always one of my favorites, so to be able to get on Night Gallery as my start was terrific I loved it. It was a license to be crazy, and allowed me to work with an extraor- dinary range of people in all different phases of production, including casting and direction. It's an experience you have maybe once in your lifetime." One of the reasons Wright got involved in so many phases of production was Laird's production style. "He really didn't like to talk to people," says Wright. "He would much prefer to sit in his office or be in a screening room or behind a typewriter. Any time he had to go out and see people, it al- ways irritated him. So he would kind of do things from his office, and I would be the one sent out to talk to people on the set, or go to the network." THE FUNERAL KEEPING ABREAST OF THE CENSORS Convincing Herb Schlosser that a man could fall in love with a mermaid proved to be a much easier task for Wright, Laird, and Serling than proving to the network Standards & Practices people (also known as the network censors) that Lindemann’s Catch would not weaken the moral fiber of America. "It was beautiful," Wright sfeys of the episode. "Very well done. But this is about a mermaid, and as we all know, mer- maids do not wear size D-cup bras. Mermaids are nude from the waist up and fish from the waist down, right? Big prob- lem with the network. 'You're not going to show breasts are you?' Come on, it was the late Sixties, Hair'd been around — I mean, it wasn't like a big deal, but no one has ever shown that on television." After much discussion with the network, a deal was struck. "We should show her breasts only if they were cov- ered with her hair down the front," remembers Wright. "So we had to carefully lay hair over there and glue it up and down her breasts to be able to shoot this show. The network guy was down to make sure that these breasts were covered. "Comes the day I've got to take the film over there. We've got twice the amount of broadcast standards guys we'd normally have, and they're all ready to see these breasts, and to make sure that America will not be troubled by the sight of a nipple or something. About two thirds of the way through this thing, all of a sudden 'There it is! There it is!' We have to stop [the film] and run it back and forth. And I said, 'What are you talking about?' And they claim they can see [something] just for a flash, when she's being carried. 'There's a nipple! We know there's a nipple!' It was the great nipple investigation. "This went on for two weeks, with us going back and forth, to the Moviola, the screening room, and all the way up to the top guy at NBC. Turns out it was not her nipple at all; it was her elbow. But we had to clip the' shot of the elbow for fear that anyone in the audience might think that they'd seen a nipple on Night Gallery." ■ TWILIGHT ZONE 69 Show- by- Show Guide m wmmt. GREEN FINGERS GREEN FINGERS Teleplay by Rod Serling, from a short story by R. C. Cook. Directed by John Badham. Cameron Mitchell (Michael J. Saunders), Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Bowen), Michael Bell (Ernest), Harry Hickox (Sheriff), Bill Quinn (Doctor), Larry Watson (1st Deputy), Jeff Burton (2nd Deputy), George Keymas (Crowley) Good evening. Please come in. These little objets d'art that you see surrounding me, you won't find in your average art museum, because these are unusual paintings and statuary that come to life, or death, whatever the case may be. Be- cause this is The Night Gallery. For the horticulturists amongst you, here's a dandy. A lady who plants things, and then steps back and watches them grow: roses, rhododendron, tulips, and things never be- fore to be found coming out of the ground— just put in. The subject of this painting has "Green Fingers." The widow Bowen's home is surrounded by an explosion of flowers and vegetables and plants of all kinds. It is also blocking a new development project by the Saunders Con- struction Company. Hence, the arrival —with cigar, limousine and assorted plenipotentiaries -of Michael J. Saunders, deter- mined to buy the place he describes as "a rinky-dink pimple on the arm of progress." But this is Mrs. Bowen's home, and not for sale. Her joy is her garden. She can plant nearly anything, and it'll grow. She indicates a stick of kindling, planted on a whim, and now sprouting delicate branches. "I have green fingers, you see," she explains. He understands gardens. His mother had a garden. But he insists that she sell. She refuses. He leaves, but is not finished yet. That night, Saunders meets with Crowley, a hireling. He tells Crowley to do what he must, but get her off that land. Later, ambulances arrive at the Bowen house. The sheriff fol- lows a trail of blood to the garden, where a hysterical Bowen 70 TWILIGHT ZONE is working in the garden, in shock, one of her fingers having been cut off by Crowley. The finger is nowhere to be found. The seventy-seven-year-old widow dies of shock soon thereafter. Later, Saunders inspects the house that will shortly be his. As he stands in the garden, the ground begins to swell. He panics, runs for the car, but the driver leaves without him. He returns to the garden, and now there is a hole in the ground and tracks leading into the house. There he sees Mrs. Bowen — but not quite Mrs. Bowen. Roots grow from her legs, twigs from her arms. She told him she had green fingers, she says. Everything she plants, grows. Saunders stumbles out of the house, hair white with shock, and half-mad, mutters, "Momma7 Anybody? Wanna hear the funniest thing? You know what grows from old la- dies' fingers7 Old ladies." THE FUNERAL Teleplay by Richard Matheson, from his short story. Directed by John Meredyth Lucas. Joe Flynn (Milton Silkline), Werner Klemperer (Ludwig Astor), Harvey Jason (Morrow), Charles Macaulay (Count), Jack Laird (Ygor), Lara Lacey (Jenny the Witch), Diana Hale (First Vampire), Leonidas D. Ossetynski (Second Vampire), Jerry Summers (Bruce the Werewolf) Funeral home art, you might call it. Example: this item here. The somber silence of shrouds, the gray, unhappy light of a sunless dawn, and a horse-drawn casket, very much in keep- ing with the motif of this place. The title of the painting, "Funeral. " Ludwig Astor arrives at Silkline's Cut-Rate Catafalques in search of a funeral service. Milton Silkline is more than happy to oblige, his motto, "When your loved one lies upon that lonely couch of eternal sleep, let Silkline draw the cover- let." Astor is touched, and requests their largest room, their most expensive coffin, all the trimmings. Cost is no object. Then Milton learns that the recipient of the services is Astor himself. "I never had a proper going-off. It was all catch as catch can, all improvised, nothing, how shall I say. . . tasty." He always intended to make up for it. Milton is outraged — until Astor leans forward, exposing the fangs of a vampire. It's not a joke. He sets a date for the service, a week hence. All must be prepared. Then he turns a corner, and Milton sees a bat flying out of the building. A week later, all is ready. One by one, the guests arrive. Vampires, a witch, a werewolf, a ghoul, and Ygor, Astor 's as- sistant. Astor tries on the coffin, loves it. All is perfect as the Count begins a lofty soliloquy, using words nobody can fol- low. The witch complains, gets rowdy as she's told to be quiet. Suddenly the werewolf, late for lunch, departs noisily through the window. Matters escalate, the witch keeps com- plaining, and finally they ask her to leave. This triggers a tantrum, and as she throws spells and fireballs around mad- ly, Milton faints. A week later, the damage repaired, a box arrives con- taining a thank-you note from Astor, who apologizes for his friends' manners, and hopes the enclosed fee will make up for it. The box contains a staggering sum of money. Milton is counting it when a Lovecraftian apparition materializes in his office. 'A friend recommended you to me," it says. "Cost is of no importance." And as the creature's choking atmosphere fills the room, Milton reaches for his pen and begins filling out the forms. THE FUNERAL THE TUNE IN DAN’S CAFE Teleplay by Gerald Sanford & Garrie Bateson, based on a short story by Shamus Frazier. Directed by David Rawlins. Pernell Roberts (Joe Bellman), Susan Olivier (Kelly Bellman), James Nusser (Dan), James Davidson (Roy), Brooke Mills (Red) We don't ask you to believe this particular painting— death's head hovering over jukebox— but it does point up the all- inclusive quality of the occult. Phantom spectres can be found not only in haunted houses, but in places youd least expect to find them. Places Ifke this. Our painting is called "The Tune in Dan's Cafe." Joe and Kelly Bellman, returning from a trip designed to help salvage their marriage— which doesn't seem to have succeeded — stop for late dinner at a little place called Dan's Cafe. They find no one inside. While they wait for service, Joe tries the jukebox, finding the song that they heard the first night they met. Their song. He calls it up — but instead of the one he wanted, it begins playing a country song about love and betrayal. But the record never gets further than the line, "words like love, and truth, and goodness— words like 'til death. . ." On "'til death" the record skips, repeats, and fi- nally stops. No matter what song he calls up, the jukebox continues to play the same song, which skips at the same place — as we suddenly start intercutting with another couple, and unex- plained scenes of carnage in the same restaurant. The owner of the cafe, Dan, confirms that the jukebox won't play any- thing else. He's had it fixed, replaced, had the record removed, but still it plays only that. It was their song, he says, as we again intercut back in time. The couple: Roy and Red, so called because she only wore red dresses. Roy has plans, wants to get out of town, and is fiercely jealous of Red. She, on the other hand, is open to flirtation and talking to strangers. Roy plans a robbery, which he thinks will get them enough money to get out of town once and for all. Before the robbery, he sees her in a car with an- other man, and slaps her. She doesn't like it. Later, after the robbery, he's waiting for her at the cafe, playing their song, when the police arrive. He's been set TWILIGHT ZONE 71 Mm ^***^*W*AV^^*NN*^^^V** ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY LINDEMANN’S CATCH up — doubtless by Red. He tries to shoot his way out, but a hail of bullets riddles the cafe, killing him and shattering the jukebox in mid-play. Now, in the present, Dan thinks that perhaps the juke- box is waiting for her to return, as Roy had been. At that moment, the jukebox begins playing the song again. Dis- turbed at this, Joe and Kelly leave Dan's cafe. As they get into the car, they see another car arrive. A couple emerges: a man. . .and a woman in red. Quickly, Joe and Kelly head for the road home. Meanwhile, behind them, the couple enters the cafe, the song continuing oh the jukebox, as suddenly there's a scream from inside, and a gunshot. The record skips at " 'til death." Then, at last, Dan's Cafe is silent. LINDEMANN’S CATCH Written by Rod Serling. Directed by Jeff Corey. Stuart Whitman (Lindemann), Jack Aranson (Nicholas), John Alderson (Granger), Harry Townes (Suggs), Jim Boles (Ben- net), Ed Bakey (Ollie), Matt Pelto (Phineas), Michael Stan- wood (Charlie), Anabel Garth (mermaid) Ladies and gentleman, good evening. We offer up hopefully salutary, possibly educative, but certainly a few terrifying little items in this the mausoleum of the malignant. An art- house full of bogeys, elves, pixies, bad fairies, and a few daemonic inhabitants, all put together for your pleasure and titillation in what we call The Night Gallery. Painting number one, having to do with fishermen and what they fish for. Or more specifically in this case, a fisher- man and what he wasn't fishing for. What appeared in his net one afternoon defies logic, reason, and belief. But there it was, "Lindemann's Catch.'' A stormy, cold. New England night at the turn of the century. Suggs, a man who reads cards and tells fortunes and offers potions in exchange for drinks, is holding forth in a tavern as Lindemann, a fisherman and captain of his own small boat, enters in need of a drink and a few hours' peace. But Suggs goes to him, despite Lindemann's desire for quiet, offering to read his palm or his tea leaves, perhaps whip up a little potion. Lindemann turns on him, enraged. He doesn't like his life, he has to put up with the fog, and the sea, "and that leaky ratcatcher of mine," but he doesn't have to put up with Suggs. He throws Suggs's cards into a spittoon, and follows up by shoving Suggs's face down there, where he says it be- longs. Then he strikes Suggs and storms out of the tavern, with Suggs calling back that he's an evil man, he can't live, can’t love, can't share. Lindemann returns to his boat, where his deck hands are shocked by what they have found entangled in their net with the day's catch: a mermaid. From the waist up, a beauti- ful woman; from the waist down, a fish. His first impulse is to kill it. It's a monster. But she reaches out to him, speech- lessly imploring him, and something in him responds. Others from the tavern have gathered around, and an offer is made to put it on exhibit, charge admission, split the profits. But Lindemann orders everyone to leave. Three days pass. Lindemann hasn't put out to sea for more catch. The deck hands, restless, try to discuss it with Lindemann, but he is preoccupied, waiting for the doctor. Upon his arrival, a worried Lindemann explains that she won't eat. She's sick. The doctor doesn't know what he can do, she's not human. Lindemann disagrees. She's more hu- man than most. He speaks with her, after a fashion. Though dumb, she makes her needs known to him. The doctor examines her but can only conclude that she’s been out of the water too long. Her only hope is for Lindemann to throw her back. She's not meant to be a com- panion to man. Lindemann won't even consider this — he keeps her with him because he is lonely, and has at last found something he can love. When Suggs hears of this, he goes to Lindemann, and, talk- ing quickly, offers a solution: a potion that will make a whole woman out of her. She'll be walking on two legs by dawn. Willing to grasp at any hope, Lindemann gives her the potion and goes above to wait. At dawn, he goes back below decks to where she lies covered with blankets. He lifts one corner of the blanket and sees a pair of perfect feet and legs. Ecstatic, he rushes topside, shouting his thanks to Suggs, and proclaiming that the mermaid is a woman nowl Met by skep- tical stares, Lindemann calls her to come up and show them. Slowly, the blanket-covered figure rises, climbs up the steps to where Lindemann can see her. And he screams at what he sees. She emerges onto the deck— revealed now to be a woman from the waist down, and fish-like from the waist up. Before the horrified onlookers can react, she dives into the water. Hys- terical with shock and desperation, Lindemann dives after her, disappearing beneath the waters. Later, a funeral ceremony is held aboard the boat, a sin- gle wreath tossed into the water, and Suggs, unmoved, tries to find another customer for his readings, potions, and charms. 72 TWILIGHT ZONE ROD SERLING’S NIGHT GALLERY ^^^^^wvwwvwvywyv A FEAST OF BLOOD Teleplay by Stanford Whitmore, from a short story by Dulcie Gray. Directed by Jeannot Szwarc Sondra Locke (Sheila Gray), Norman Lloyd (Henry Mallory), Hermione Baddeley (Mrs. Gray), Patrick O'Hara (Frankie), Barry Bernard (Gippo), Cara Burgess (Girl), Gerald S. Peters (Chauffeur) In the general generic area of costume jewelry, note girl and note expression. Obviously a lady much disturbed by what- ever little bauble she has recently been the recipient of. Uh — said sentence improperly ending on a preposition — but this story ending in a much more deadly note than that. We call it "A Feast of Blood. " Henry Mallory arrives at the Gray home to pick up his date for the evening, Sheila, an attractive woman who is aware of the effect she has on men. She dates Henry to satis- fy her mother's desire that she keep her options open, despite her intention to marry someone else. Sheila doesn't much like Henry. "He's small and soft and repulsive as a slug." But he's a monied slug, so the narcissistic Sheila tolerates him. At dinner, Henry presents her with an unusual gift: a furred broach that looks like an exotic mouse. It is held tight in the broach by a gold pin. It's expensive, but Henry is quite successful, despite his homely appearance. What he wants, he gets. And what he wants is her. She drops all pretense and laughs at his ambitions. She is the one thing he will never have. He seems unaffected by this, and returns the conversa- tion to the broach. It's quite rare. It's a form of mouse, an ancestor to the bat. He removes the pin that fastens it to her blouse, and it remains, holding on by its prehensile feet, almost as though alive. She thanks him for the gift, but insists that this is good- bye. He drives her home, taking a back road. In the middle of nowhere, he stops the car and mocks her for choosing an- other man just because he is more handsome. She storms out of the car, saying, "I'd rather die than stay with you." It's her choice, he says, then drives away. As she begins the long walk back to town, the creature, free of the pin, moves toward her throat. She pricks her fin- ger on it, and realizes that it's moved — too late. It hangs on, and attacks, growing as big as a dog. Moments later, one of a pair of bicyclists sees something rushing through the night, "its head black and shiny, like it was covered with blood." Moments later, they find Sheila's body. Meanwhile, at a bar, Henry Mallory introduces himself to a beautiful woman. She is unimpressed by his homely ap- pearance. When he presents her with a broach, identical to the other, she accepts it, but explains, "this doesn't mean any- thing." He smiles. "Of course. It's just that I am compelled — to honor beauty." THE LATE MR. PEDDINGTON Teleplay by Jack Laird, based on a short story by Frank Sisk. Directed by Jeff Corey. Harry Morgan (Thaddeus Conway), Kim Hunter (Cora Ped- dington), Randy Quaid (John) A dead man splattered on a concrete walk. Not the most ap- petizing of scenes, not the pleasantest of stories. But, if you're interested remotely in homey homicides, this may be your bag. We call it "The Late Mr. Peddington. Cora Peddington arrives at Conway's funeral parlor, in search of an economical undertaker. She's making the rounds to try to cut expenses, a need underlined as she rolls her own cigarette. The recipient is her husband, Adam, a wealthy business- man. It was quite sudden, she explains. She'd forgotten to mention that repairmen had removed the balcony on their penthouse apartment. So one morning he stepped out -and down thirty stories. Conway is appalled . . . and confused. If Adam was doing well, why the need for her to cut expenses? There must be quite an inheritance. There is. But Adam never liked rich widows, and felt that between death and inheritance a "purgative period should ensue." Consequently, she must live only on the insur- ance money for two years. The amount: $2,000. With in- creases for accidental death, that makes it $4,000 for two years. So she goes down the list of options she can afford: no reconstruction, no coffin (a basket will do), cremation rather than burial .... Later, Conway's assistant John asks if they got the job. Conway says that no one underbids him. They got it. Then why didn't she tell them to collect the body? "She was shop- ping, John," Conway says. "Shopping. She had to make cer- tain that under the conditions of her husband's will she could realistically afford the price of even a cut-rate funeral." So? "So, now she has to go home and—" And at that moment, Adam Peddington steps out onto the balcony that's no longer there, and plummets thirty stories to the ground. ■ THE LATE MR. PEDDINGTON TWILIGHT ZONE 73 , rv CARNIVAL CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47 "It's all right, Lars, it's good meat. Maybe not like Mama makes, huh? So. Open your mouth." The people's eyes, staring, pitying, a million eyes, and hums of voices in the colored restaurant. Then a kind of quiet, like sharp prongs in the Feeling. In the little Feeling, coming awake. "Now, so? You are finished. No, the milk, the milk to make you strong." Off out of the arena, back into the movement. And out into the very heart of the shining motion. Lars stopped fighting. He let his eyes see and his mind fill. Last one there is a sissy and Father seated in a small car, bumping the car into others and howling. First one to the trestle and the slow circling ferris wheel with the squealing dots. Just try and catch me, just try. . . . "Come now, Lars, we rest." The horror in the washroom and out again, feeding the Feeling, sending it along the spiral. The music bellowing and even in the little car in tfie black- ness of the Fun House — movement there. Sudden lights on painted monsters, cot- ton bats squeaking along invisible wires. And then — Here we go, folks. The experience of a lifetime. Yah yah hear! See 'em all — the Frog Man, Queenie the Fat Girl (three hundred pounds of feminine love- liness!), Marco the Flame-Eater, yah yah, all inside, all inside .... "Come, Lars, after this we will go. But if it is like last time— you never saw anything like it. Funny-looking crazy people. It's good, good." And, as a special attraction, ladies and gents, we have Jackie the Basket- Case. No arms, no legs, but he writes and plays cards and shaves, right before your very eyes. Science gave him up as lost, but you'll see him now. Jackie, the Basket-Case. And the headless girl, who defies doctors throughout the universe! Nurses in attendance! Heah, heah, heah! Only ten cents, the tenth part of a dollar. Square canvas flags with strange pictures on them. A man with feathers. And in front, high on the platform, a man with a striped shirt and a cane, hitting a pan. "So, we go in." Lars said nothing. He listened to all the sounds and how they seemed like the swift rush of cold wind and rain across his face. His heart beat and his blood pounded against his temples. I'll beat you, Lars .... Lars felt his chair being pushed forward. Out of the sunlight and quick- ly into the dimly lighted interior, he Lars looked at the armless , legless man in the cheap basket and in one explosion, the thought sprang from the Feeling and scattered through his brain. could see nothing at first. Only what he had been seeing for hours. There was the sudden quiet, for one thing. Nothing to see yet, but like dropping from a close, hot hay-loft to freshly watered earth. Damp and cool, like perhaps a grave. The Feeling stopped growing for a moment as Lars focused his eyes. He wondered where all the people had gone, what had happened, if he were back in the silent, unmoving room. The cold stillness and then the soft mutter- ing of voices, strange and out of place. "Here, Lars, don't you see?" Mr. Nielson ran his hand through Lars's hair and touched his shoulder. The chair moved over ploughed ground. "Papa, what—" Mr. Nielson giggled no louder than the other people in the tent. "Ha, ha! Look, boy, look at the woman!" Lars saw the object that Father had called a woman. The product of mutant glands, a huge sitting thing with moun- tains of flesh. Flowering from the neck down the arms and looping over the el- bows, dividing like a baby's skin at the hands; the thighs, cascading flesh and fat over the legs down to the feet. And over all this, a metallic costume with purple sequins attached and short black hair, cut like a boy's. "Have you ever seen anything so big, Lars!" Lars looked from his wheelchair into the eyes of the fat lady and then quickly away from them. Over the ground. Stopping. The sign reading The Frog Man, and four people staring. "Look! Olihh!" Shriveled limbs with life sticking to them. Shriveled, dried-up, twisted legs, bent grotesquely. And the young man with the pimples on his face crouching on these legs, leering. Every few mo- ments, the legs moving and the small body hopping upwards. Lars tried to shake his head. The Feeling started, from where it had left off, but it traveled elsewhere now. It traveled from his mind to his eyes and from his eyes outward. "Come, it will be late. We must see everything. Oh, look, have you ever seen such a crazy thing!" Lars leaned his head forward pain- fully and looked. The face of a very old man, but smooth along the creases and over the wrinkles. Wrinkled hands, thin hair. An old man standing three feet from the ground. But not merely small. Every- thing dwarfed. The false beard and the 74 TWILIGHT ZONE gnome's cap and the stretched-gauze wings. The Feeling went into the eyes of the midget. "There, over there! There was no such last time!" Over the ground slowly, past the man with the pictures on his skin, the black creeping thing, the boy with the breasts, slowly past these, slowly so the Feeling could be fed and gathered. And now, the Feeling reaching across the tent to the other side, reaching into the woman with seventeen toes, the boy with the ugly face, the alligator girl, the human chicken, reaching and bringing back, nursing, feeding, iden- tifying. Identifying. Then ceasing. "Lars, look. Never was there such a thing." Mr. Nielson's voice was low and full of deep wonder as he craned his head over the people's shoulders. Lars tried one last time to see the blue of the linoleum, the gray of his room, all the quiet things his mind had made so carefully. But his eyes moved. It was large, made of wicker, padded and made to look like an egg basket on the outside. There was in front of it a square card with writing, which gave dates and facts, but the card was dirty and difficult to read. The thing in the basket lay still. A knitted garment covered the mid- section and lower part. Above, the pale flesh stretched over irregular bumps and lines, past the smooth arm-sockets on up to the finely combed black hair, newly barbered. The face was handsome and young, clean-shaven and delicate. When it lifted, Mr. Nielson and the other staring people gasped. In the mouth was a pencil and with this pencil, the thing in the basket be- gan to write upon a special pad of pa- per. The lead was soft so that those nearby could make out the words, which were "My name is Jack Rennie. I am very happy." Lars saw his father's hands about his side, lifting and pushing. "Look, see what it does!" Lars's body trembled, suspended above the basket, held in air. Every- thing trembled and shook, as teeth held a moving pencil and the pencil made words. The limbless man thought, it— he— thought . . . . The automobile came straight at Lars, and he saw it now. Saw it speed- ing over the trestle for him, bellowing its warning. The brakes screeched in his head and he saw the car swerve and ca- reen in the wet road. And then floating down the trestle, below it, onto sharp, hard things. Lars looked from his wheelchair at the armless, legless man in the cheap basket and in one explosion, the thoughts sprang from the Feeling and scattered through his brain, moving, dancing, swinging arms, jumping on legs, mov- ing, moving with all the ecstasy of a dead child brought suddenly to life. "It shaves, see, talks, it writes!" Lars rode his bicycle in the sunlight down through the fields near the river and never stopped, for he was never tired. He rode past laughing people and waved his arms at children blurring in the distance. He pushed his young legs on the pedals and flew past all the things of the country and then of the world, all the things best seen from the eyes of a young boy on a bicycle. The thing in the wicker basket ceased to exist. The grinning, gasping people ceased to exist and Father was someone sitting in a chair, smoking his pipe. Lars had reached the crest of Straw- berry Hill and he lifted his feet, drifting and floating downward, letting the wind and rain and sunlight whirl past. Mr. Nielson gently pulled Lars back in the wheelchair and rolled silently from the darkened tent into the afternoon. The people were sparse. They strag- gled by hoarse vendors and still rides, yawning and shuffling. Mr. Nielson forgot about the tent and began to talk. "Well, we go home now. AH day at the carnival, what, my son? Ah, Lars, I tell you. Mama should not have stayed home. Now you feel good, you will be a fine man and think, eh, Lars?" Mr. Nielson picked leaves from overhanging branches as he walked, feeling good and pleased. When he got into the car, he looked at his son's eyes. "Lars, there is nothing wrong? You don't look like you feel so good." Lars was going too fast to hear Father, the wind was shrieking too wildly. The green hills turning golden, the leaves from orange to white, and all the other boys and girls riding behind him, chasing, trying to catch him. He turned, laughing. "Who's the sissy now, who's the sissy now!" Mr. Nielson scowled. "You'll never catch me, you'll never catch me!" "What, what is that you say?" Lars sang into the wind as the chil- dren's voices grew faint. He waved his arms and pedaled with his legs and saw the beautiful hill stretching beneath him. "You just watch, you just watch!" The beautiful hill sloping graceful- ly downward and without an end. ■ "Good heavens, Elaine. . .have you seen the moon tonight?" TWILIGHT ZONE 75 tV Beaumont CONTINUED FROM PAGE 53 light Zone is about people— about human beings involved in extraordinary cir- cumstances, in strange problems of their own or of fate's making." Though Serling was contractually obligated to write eighty percent of The Twilight Zone's scripts himself, he made sure that the stories he adapted, and the writers he hired to write original scripts, maintained the highest standard of quality. After a brief (and disas- trous) call for unsolicited scripts, Ser- ling turned to two writers with proven experience in the form — Richard Mathe- son and Charles Beaumont. Between them, Matheson and Beau- mont wrote more than forty of the show's episodes. "Chuck and I just pitched ideas and then started in writing scripts," recalls Matheson. "For a long time, it was just the two of us and Rod.' As Rod Serling himself recalls, Beau- mont didn't make a particularly good impression at their first meeting. "This was just after [Serling's teleplay] Velvet Alley had aired," said Serling, "and Chuck Beaumont, whom 1 didn't even know, in a very tasteful way— nothing offensive in the way he did it— said 'Quite honestly, I must tell you to your face, it's the worst piece of writing I've ever seen'. " Luckily, it had only a posi- tive effect on the working relationship between Beaumont and Serling. "It put Chuck and me on a very good basis, because I feel now not only the right but the obligation to speak to Chuck honestly. . . ." Among the most memorable of Beaumont's Twilight Zone episodes were "Perchance to Dream," about a cardiac patient who dreams of being scared to death by a beautiful woman; "Long Live Walter Jameson," starring Kevin McCar- thy as an immortal who is weary of life; "The Howling Man," about the Devil imprisoned in a monastery; and "Printer's Devil" based on Beaumont's own short story "The Devil, You Say?" Beaumont is also credited with several episodes which were written, at least in part, by other writers, including "The New Exhibit" (by Jerry Sohl), and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You" (by John Tomerlin). In addition, he played an important part in the deci- sion to adapt several stories by George Clayton Johnson (including "The Four of Us Are Dying," "Execution," "The Prime Mover," and "Ninety Years With- out Slumbering.") Johnson himself went on to write four teleplays for The Twilight Zone: "A Penny for Your Thoughts," "Kick the Can," 'A Game of Pool," and "Nothing in the Dark." In all, as a writer, an adapter, and a catalyst for other writers, Beaumont made a greater contribution to The Twilight Zone than anyone other than Rod Ser- ling himself. And his episodes are ac- knowledged as among the program's best work. The Edge of Frenzy The summer of 1961 found Beaumont involved in an explosively controversial project: the first motion picture to deal with the volatile problem of Southern school integration. It was based on his novel The Intruder, inspired by a 1957 Look magazine article about the efforts of segregationist John Kasper to sabotage school integration in Clinton, Tennes- see. Adam Cramer, the central figure in Beaumont’s story (portrayed by actor William Shatrier), is on a similar mis- sion. He fails, as Kasper failed, but not before mob violence has taken its ugly toll, as it actually did in Clinton. Intrigued by Kasper, Beaumont packed a suitcase and flew to Clinton to interview him. "Chuck just got up and went down there," recalls Matheson. "Lived there; talked to all of the people there. It seems to me he got himself a gun, too, because everybody was really suspicious about him going around ask- ing questions." A year and a half later his novel was finished. Beaumont was subse- quently hired to do the screenplay adaptation for director Roger Corman. When Corman, whose forte had long been science fiction/horror, was unable to obtain studio backing, he finished The Intruder on an independent basis. The movie was shot on location in and near Charleston, Missouri, on a shoe- string budget of one hundred thousand dollars, and utilized some three hundred local townspeople in its cast. Beaumont went along to oversee his script and to essay the cameo role of school principal Harley Paton. The film was never suc- cessful in general release due to compli- cations over its controversial nature. It was later exploited under the misnomer, I Hate Your Guts, and, later. Shame. Beaumont would later work with Corman on several Poe-inspired films, including The Premature Burial (written in collaboration with Ray Russell), The Haunted Palace, and The Masque of the Red Death. He also worked on such fantasy film classics as Bum, Witch, Bum (with Richard Matheson), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (with David P. Harmon and William Roberts), and the Oscar-winning film The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. By now, film and television offers were flooding in. At times Beaumont juggled as many as a dozen projects simultaneously, and would have to farm the extra work out to his friends. "Chuck was hyper-energetic," says Mathe- son. "From the day I met him he was always hyperactive, always restless. Had to move. Had to go someplace. Got to go. I remember him talking about hating the idea of being asleep. He even hated the idea of someone see- ing him asleep. Because sleep to him was like: I'm not doing anything. I'm wasting time." At the peak of his career, Beau- mont rarely turned down an assign- ment, and he soon found himself over- whelmed with writing commitments. "He was taking on so much work that he couldn't do it all," says Johnson. "So he'd farm the work out to his friends — Ray Russell would be working with him on a Roger Corman film. Bill Nolan would be polishing a magazine article, Jery Sohl and myself would be at home writing the first draft of a television script while John Tomerlin was working on a third. And Chuck would be run- ning all over town, trying to keep dif- ferent appointments." Says Nolan: "Chuck tried to fit a million things into a spot where you could fit maybe a thousand. He'd some- times schedule, say, four meetings with different people for the same day. And he'd be late for all of them. So he'd say to the first person he was meeting, "Look, I'm running late and I've got to see Ray Russell. So come along and well talk on the way.' By the time he got to Ray's he'd be on short time, and he'd say, 'Ray, jump in the car. I've got to see Dick Matheson, and well all talk while we're driving there.' And there would be whole entourages in the car by the time he got to the final person. It was really wild stuff. But he lived this kind of life at the edge of frenzy all the time." Nolan, Johnson, and Tomerlin's sales, at this point, were primarily in short fiction, and although the short story market of this time was a healthy one, their earnings were considerably less than that of Beaumont's. "Chuck was always trying to figure a way to get a little more work than he could do be- cause he knew we really wanted it; could really use it," says Johnson, "if it was something that could be done, that didn't have to have a personal touch. "He couldn't share the credit with you because they wouldn't keep hiring him if they knew he was forming a [writing] factory and farming out to his friends — we people who had not yet , succeeded in those circles." In return for his friends' help, Beaumont would split the money fifty- fifty with them. "Chuck was a big suc- cess," says Johnson. "He always had something going— an article, a story, a script. He also had the contacts. Al- though the rest of us were working, there was a great envy in us of him. We all would've liked to have had that." Though he'd attained a high-level of creative and financial success in film and television, Beaumont had often confided to close friends his desire to return to novel writing, and, in 1963, decided to finish Where No Man Walks — a novel he'd begun in 1957. But time was running out on Beaumont. Remember? Remember? By mid-1963 his concentration began to slip; he was using Bromo Seltzer constantly to cope with ever-increasing headaches. Friends remarked he looked notably older than his thirty-four years. By 1964, he could no longer write. Meetings with producers turned disas- trous. His speech became slower; more deliberate. His concentration worsened. Meanwhile, his family and friends desper- ately tried to understand and treat his symptoms. "Chuck had constant head- aches," says Nolan. "I can't think of Chuck without the word 'headache'. He was always in good spirits and didn't let the headaches stop him, but it was something he was fighting all the time." In the summer of 1964, after a bat- tery of tests at UCLA, Beaumont was diagnozed as having Alzheimer's Disease; he faced premature senility, aging, and an early death. "The saving grace to it," says Tomerlin, "if there is one in a dis- ease like that, is he was not really aware, after the very beginning, that there was anything wrong with him. When he first began to show strong symptoms of it, he would have kind of momentary flashes of great concern, as though he saw something happening and couldn't understand what it was. But it was a fairly gentle process." Charles Beaumont died February 21, 1967, at the age of thirty-eight. His last hardcover book was titled Remem- ber? Remember?, and as Bill Nolan ob- serves, "there is so much to remember about Charles Beaumont: [a] midnight call in California. . .Chuck calling from Chicago to tell me he planned to spend the day with Ian Fleming and why not join them? . . . the frenzied, nutty nights when we plotted Mickey Mouse adven- Beaumont tures for the Disney Magazines . . . the bright, hot, exciting racing weekends at Palm Springs, Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach ... the whirlwind trips to Paris and Nassau and New York ... the ses- sion on the set at Twilight Zone when he'd exclaim, 'I write it and they create it in three dimensions. God, but it's magic!' . . . the fast, machine-gun rattle of his typewriter as I talked to Helen in the kitchen while he worked in the den . . . the rush to the newsstand for the latest Beaumont story. ..." Charles Beaumont: WRITING AS THERAPY "I'm very cynical. I don't believe in Extra Sensory Perception or polter- geists or flying saucers. I don't believe in ghosts, either. What I do believe in is the capacity of the human mind to create objects of fear — what is more frightening, for instance, than Frankenstein's monster? What we fan- tasy writers do is create substitutes for belief. "All the fantasy writers I know have a way of dwelling on their own fears and phobias. A writer spends his life being his own psychiatrist." Chad Oliver, who'd met Beaumont during his stay in Los Angeles while at- tending UCLA in 1952, recalls him as a man of enormous vitality and energy. "I can't remember what it was particularly that attracted me to Chuck, except for his tremendous enthusiasm for life." "Chuck loved fast cars and racing," recalls Ray Russell. "He loved music and comic strips and fine books and good music. He loved language, our motley, marvelous English in particular. But most of all, he loved to write." And, though much of Beaumont's fic- tion deals with the macabre, his per- sonality was anything but morbid. "He was full of wit and warmth," says Rus- sell, "and was not ashamed of being a deep-dyed romantic." "He was a dear, dear friend," says George Clayton Johnson. "I think of Chuck as one of the most influential men in our lives and someone who was largely responsible for Nolan, Tomer- Iin, and myself becoming writers." Beaumont was, above all, a crafts- man, a born storyteller who was able to touch something universal in all of us, while adding a unique, echoing, in- definable ambience which was distinc- tively his. He was gifted with the abili- ty to entertain us, while showing us the Chad Oliver: the blue SUIT WITH THE RED VEST "Chuck Beaumont had one good suit. It was a blue suit. And he had a red waistcoat-type vest that he wore with it. And when things were really going badly for him, financially — which was frequently, as an aspiring writer — Chuck would put on the suit with the red vest and would go, as I recall, down on Sunset Boulevard, into the fanciest restaurants he could find and ask to see the manager. He would say, as only Chuck could, nothing obse- quious about it, 'Sir, I am Charles Beaumont. I am going to be a world- famous writer. If you will give me a free meal, I will make you famous some day by putting you in a story.' I saw him do this on two occasions, and Chuck told me that in all the years he pulled this stunt— and he pulled it a lot— he'd only been turned down once. One of the things I'd al- ways admired about him was the style with which he'd pulled it off. It was none of this, 'Oh, gosh. I'm down on my luck; things are terrible.' No. He was doing them a favor by walking in and agreeing to eat in their restaurant. And that's the way he looked at it." darker, more private parts of ourselves at the same time. The innovations he and his colleagues brought to horror and fantasy are the foundation of those genres current popularity. Every writer, artist, or filmmaker who has followed Beaumont into that night country he knew so well — from Stephen King and Steven Spielberg to Clive Barker and David Cronenberg— owes him an enor- mous debt. Although he didn't live to realize his full potential, he packed more creativity into a dozen years than most writers accomplish in a lifetime. By the time of his death, he'd written and sold ten books, seventy-four short stories, thirteen screenplays (nine of which were produced), two dozen articles and profiles, forty stories for comics, and over seventy teleplays. But though Beaumont is gone, the magic that he wove in those all-night coffee shop bull sessions, those drives to the beach, those solitary hours behind the typewriter, those rare, quiet moments at home, is still alive. It's alive in the family he left behind, the friends whose lives and careers were touched and moved by his, and in the words he wrote that continue to move us today. ■ 78 TWILIGHT ZONE TZ TELEPLAY BY GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON The original teleplay first broad- cast on January 5, 1962 Producer Buck Houghton Director Lamont Johnson CAST Wanda Dunn Gladys Cooper Harold Beldon Robert Redford Man R.G. Armstrong ACT ONE FADE IN: 1. (STANDARD OPENING) INTERIOR TENEMENT APARTMENT NIGHT 2. CLOSE SHOT WANDA DUNN Sleeping lightly in her bed, the covers drawn about her chin. A soft splash of light illuminates her ancient features. Wanda is incredibly old; her face seamed and lined with the hatchet grooves of the years— and yet it is a kindly, gentle face. She stirs in her sleep. SOUND: The rasp of cautious footsteps on the pave- ment outside. This is a basement apartment and the windows are above the bed. Wanda comes awake, her eyes alert. She cocks her head, listening. Again the SOUND of quiet footfalls. They pause beside the window. Wanda's eyes follow the sound apprehensively. 3. ANOTHER ANGLE THE WINDOW Several heavy boards are nailed across it. Between the chinks we see the shadow of a man's legs silhouetted. Copyright © 1961 4. CLOSE SHOT WANDA * A look of dread pinches her face. 5. ANOTHER ANGLE As Wanda quietly pushes back the covers and sits up. She is dressed in an old-style ugly night dress that covers her from chin to toes. She looks about the dim room as though taking a hasty inventory. 6. PANNING SHOT HER POV We see dusty, broken furniture, sagging wallpaper, a warped floor. The room is decrepit with age and neglect. In one wall is a door barricaded with furniture. The windows are criss- crossed with boards as though to repel invaders. The main entrance to the room is equipped with a night chain, a heavy bolt and a lock, all dogged in place. 7. CLOSE SHOT WANDA Satisfied. Everything is as she left it. And now we watch the play of expressions on her face as she listens to the stealthy drag of shoeleather on the pavement. There is a muffled o.s. (offstage) shout and a sudden clatter as the offstage feet break into a run. A POLICE WHISTLE SOUNDS, shrill, urgent. A brace of GUNSHOTS blasts the stillness. 8. WIDER ANGLE As Wanda fearfully edges out of the bed, fits her feet into slippers and cautiously moves to the door. She stands rigid, her expression fearful. More FOOTFALLS from outside, above. Another GUNSHOT, close, loud. A GRUNT of pain followed by the heavy, slithering thump of a body tumbling by George Clayton Johnson TWILIGHT ZONE 79 % - NOTHING IN THE DARK down a flight of concrete steps. The door rattles in its frame as the o.s. body slams against it. Wanda flinches backward. She has stopped breathing as sjie listens. A MOAN — a weak rap at the door. VOICE (O.S.) (weakly, a husky whisper) Help. . . ! (a long pause) Please — help! Wanda freezes against the door. WANDA (timid) Who is it? Go away! VOICE (O.S.) (in pain) Please — I've been shot.... Need help!! Wanda is very frightened. Her withered hand goes to the night chain and then draws back. WANDA Who are you? VOICE (O.S.) (the words come very hard indeed) I'm an officer— police. Open the door. . . . (a wracking cough) Need help. Wanda's expression is a compound of uncertainty and hid- eous fear. She makes a decision. WANDA (in agony) You're lying to me. I know you. You can't fool me. VOICE (O.S.) (weak— very weak) Help. . . . Wanda blinks uncertainly. WANDA (stronger) You're lying. You're no policeman. Why can't you leave me alone? I know who you are. (a beat) I know what you are! Her fear is a naked thing. WHIP PAN TO SERLING sitting on her recently occupied bed. He looks at her with pity. SERLING An old woman living in a nightmare. An old woman who has fought a thousand battles with death and always won. Now she's faced with a grim decision — whether or not to open a door. And in some strange and frightening way she knows that this seemingly ordinary door leads to The Twilight Zone. FADE TO BLACK BILLBOARD FIRST COMMERCIAL FADE ON: 9. INTERIOR WANDA'S APARTMENT ANGLE ON DOOR As Wanda stands frozen with terror, her back pressed against the door frame, with only the movement of her eyes to tell us of her fright. She is listening intently, and when the VOICE MOANS once again it is all she can do to keep from crying out. VOICE (O.S.) (faintly, weakly) Help. . . . Won't somebody help. . .? WANDA (a terrified whisper) Go away! I won't listen. Go away. When there is no further sound from beyond the door, Wanda slowly relaxes. Muscle by muscle her tension drains from her. A great sigh. Is it possible that he has gone7 Seeing that his ruse has failed, has he given up? Quietly her hand goes to the bolt and draws it. She turns the knob and eases the door open against the night chain. She peers through the crack in the door. CAMERA MOVES WITH HER so that we see as she sees the form sprawled on her doorstep. This is HAROLD BELDON. With a start she almost slams the door again but something stays her hand. Beldon's eyes are closed and he is unmoving. Ready to slam the door at his first move, she studies his face. He is unconscious. His head has fallen back so that we can see his face clearly. It is a young, open face. Though drawn with shock and pain it is a face in- capable of deception. His lashes flutter with returning con- sciousness and he moans softly. Surrounded by the hard concrete walls of the areaway, he looks very helpless and vul- nerable. Her breath catches in her throat as his eyes blink open. BELDON (weak) Unless you help me I'm going to die. I — I don't think I can move. WANDA (pleading) Don't say that! It isn't fair. You're trying to trick me. A bewildered look from Beldon. He shifts his arm to gain leverage in an attempt to sit up. At this slight motion Wanda's fingers grip the door. WANDA Don't move— I'll close the door. A look of confusion floods Beldon's features. He doesn't understand what is going on. It is all he can do to retain con- 80 TWILIGHT ZONE sciousness. BELDON What. . .? I've been shot. I'm bleeding to death. (the effort to speak is almost too much for him. After a moment, he continues) My name is Harold Beldon. I need an am- bulance— a doctor. Please— call the hospital. Wanda's face twists in an agony of indecision. It is possible that he is telling the truth but she cannot take the chance. WANDA I haven't a telephone. I'd have to unlock the door. You can't ask me to do that. I don't want to die. You understand? I know who you are! (a moan) Oh, why don't you leave me alone! Beldon tries to comprehend what she is saying. He under- stands the words but not the sense. The effort of trying to stay awake has beaded him with perspiration and his last strength is ebbing. 10. CLOSE SHOT BELDON The realization that he is going to die here in this black cement hole makes his face crumple. BELDON (stunned) You're not going to help me. For some rea- son I don't understand . . . you're going to let me die. (overcome by the horror of the thought, he searches for the why of it) You're afraid of me— yes, that's it. But why7 The uniform ... the gun? No — some- thing else. (a shudder goes through him and he gasps with pain) Hurts! Oh, God, it hurts! 11. CLOSE SHOT WANDA She squeezes her eyes closed and presses her face against the cold door frame. A terrible pity for the man in pain pulls at her. WANDA Stop it— stop it! Don't torture me. It isn't fair! 12. CLOSE SHOT BELDON Painfully he puts his hand inside his coat. It comes out stained with red. He looks dazedly at the blood. (brokenly) I'm bleeding. . weak. . .can't move. . . hurts. . . . (his eyes glaze, he sags and the breath seems to go out of him) His hand trails limply on the pavement and is still. 13. CLOSE SHOT WANDA Shaking with emotion as she struggles with the conflicting urges — fear for self and compassion for another. _ BY GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON WANDA It isn't fair. It isn't fair. Slowly her hand goes to the night chain -draws back. She looks at o.s. Beldon. 14. CLOSE SHOT BELDON Eyes closed -helpless -groaning softly, near unconsciousness. 15. CLOSE SHOT WANDA A flood of pity. In a blind urgency she unlatches the chain. 16. WIDER ANGLE As the door opens and Wanda peers out. After a careful sur- vey of the surrounding area she moves to Beldon, her fear of him still evident in her posture. Slowly her hand moves down to his shoulder, hovers there for a moment— then touches. She pauses as though listening to an inner music After a brief interval her face relaxes. WANDA (wonderingly) I'm still alive .... And now, briskly for one her age, she sets about the task of getting him inside. Fortunately she is not too frail for the undertaking. Once across the doorsill she closes the door and re-latches it. She leaves Beldon on the floor to return with a pillow, a blanket, and a small medical kit. Safe once again inside the house, her face has softened. With tender hands she sets about ministering to him. DISSOLVE TO: 17. ANGLE ON SOFA DAY Early morning sunlight filters through the chinks in the win- dows. Beldon has been transferred to the sofa, his head propped with pillows, his br#ss-buttoned coat and holster draped over a nearby chair. He has recovered amazingly and his face is no longer pale with pain. Wanda enters scene humming and crosses to him. She adjusts the Markets and leans back to look at him. WANDA There— you got to keep warm. BELDON (grateful smile) You should get some rest. I feel much better. (shifts position and winces) When the doctor gets here he'll take me off your hands. (at expression on her face, he pauses, coming to realization) You didn't call the doctor. She evades his eyes nervously. BELDON (CONT'D) But why not? 18. ANOTHER ANGLE FEATURING WANDA WANDA I— I can't. (after -a pause, in a rush) I don't have a telephone. BELDON Couldn't you go to one of the neighbors? WANDA They aren't any. They all moved away. TWILIGHT ZONE 81 NOTHING IN THE DARK Trucks came and took away thgir furniture — first one and then another. Even if I could call a doctor somehow I couldn't take a chance and let him in. Don't you see? He could be him. BELDON (perplexed) Him? WANDA (nodding) He has many names— The Dark One— The Grim Reaper— Mr. Death. (sees his look of disbelief) I know he's out there. He's been trying to get in. He comes to the door and knocks. He begs me to open the door. Last week he said he was from the gas company. Oh, he's clever. After that he claimed to be a contractor hired by the city, but I knew who he was. He said the building was con- demned, that I'd have to leave. I kept the door locked and he went away. He knows that I'm on to him. BELDON (trying to understand) Mr. Death? A person? Someone like you or me? Someone with arms and legs and a face7 Wanda nods with a shiver of fright. She can see that he doesn't believe her. WANDA It does sound crazy. (with terrible intensity) But it's true! I know it is. BELDON People die all over the world. China — Africa — Europe — at this very instant peo- ple are dying. How could one man be in all those places at once? The sanity and logic of the question tears her apart. She doesn't know the answer; all she knows is what she feels. WANDA (a cry) Don't ask that! I don't know! Maybe there's more than one. Maybe — (she can't continue) As she shakes with dry sobs, Beldon's eyes fill with pity. BELDON Don't— don't cry. I don't want to hurt you. He reaches his hand up toward her. She slumps to her knees beside him. BELDON There — please — there. He awkwardly pats her shoulder; her crying subsides. WANDA At first I wasn't sure. It was a long time ago. I was on a bus. There was an old woman sitting in front of me knitting— socks, I think. There was something about her face — I felt I knew her. Then this young man got on. There were empty seats but he sat down beside her. He didn't say anything, but his being there upset her. He seemed like a nice young man. When she dropped her yam, he picked it up. Right in front of me he held it out to her. I saw their fingers touch. He got off at the next stop. (a beat) When the bus reached the end of the line, she was dead. BELDON You said yourself she was an old woman .... WANDA But I've seen him since then— many times. 19. CLOSE SHOT WANDA WANDA (CONT'D) I've seen him in crowds; I watched for him. Every time someone I knew died, he was there. Once he was a young soldier— a salesman — a taxi driver— someone you wouldn't notice unless you were watching. I wondered why I could see him and no one else could, and then 1 knew. It was be- cause I was getting old and my time was coming. I could see some things clearer than younger people. 20. TWO SHOT FEATURING WANDA BELDON (going along with her) But if you know what he looks like, why be afraid? You could avoid him. WANDA His face is always different. I couldn't be sure. BELDON (trying to show absurdity of idea) When you go out— couldn't he touch you then if he wanted to? WANDA (firmly) I never go out. BELDON (doubtfully) Never? WANDA (points to barricaded windows) I haven't for years. BELDON (shocked) What about food? WANDA A boy delivers it. I leave the money and a list and I always wait till he's gone before I unlock the door. BELDON (outraged) How can you live like this? 21. CLOSE SHOT WANDA WANDA If I don't live like this, I won't live at all. If I relax my guard for even a moment, he'll get in somehow. (reflectively) I didn't always live like this. I was young, once. People said I was pretty. I lived out 82 TWILIGHT ZONE BY GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON in the sunlight. People said I'd spoil my fine complexion but I didn’t care. I loved outdoor things. (the light dies in her eyes as she looks about her) I lived out in the sunlight. She sees a patch of sun on the floor near her knee. She puts out one of her hands to form a cup for it. Her hand blazes with the sun. WANDA (CONT'D) I've always hated the cold and the dark. I’m old. I've lived a long time but I don't want to die. (she shivers) I'd rather live in the dark than not live at all. 22. CLOSE SHOT BELDON Reacting. He is deeply moved. BELDON Easy. No one is going to hurt you. We're alone here and there's no one at the door. You need rest. (he shifts again and pain autographs his face) And I — I need help. 23. TWO SHOT Wanda sags tiredly. She xises and moves to a nearby chair. There is a sudden noise at the door -the thud of heavy heels descending the concrete steps. There is a staccato knock on the door. 24. CLOSE SHOT BELDON Reacting. Surprised. A quick look at Wanda and then at the door. His eyes swing back to Wanda with a deep look of concern. 25. CLOSE SHOT WANDA Icy with fear- eyes wide and apprehensive. She has stopped breathing. then another. Now she is at the door. With trembling fingers she checks the night chain to assure herself it is fastened. An- other demanding KNOCK. She jerks with the impact of the sound. Her face is pale as she slowly draws the bolt. 29. CLOSE SHOT BELDON He is affected by her evident terror. He, too, is drawn bow- tight. He leans forward. In spite of himself he stares at the door. 30. CLOSE ON WANDA As she turns the knob -slowly- slowly. The bolt rasps in the silence. She pulls the door open an inch at a time. Suddenly, shockingly, a pressure from outside shoves the door open the length of the night chain and a FACE appears at the opening. 31. CLOSE SHOT THE FACE Filling the screen framed by the door and the jamb. It is a hard face. 26. CLOSE SHOT BELDON For a brief moment he is caught up in her terror. He shakes himself back to reality. 32. CLOSE SHOT A FOOT Wedging the door open, blocking the door so that it cannot be closed. 27. ANOTHER ANGLE FEATURING WANDA DOOR IN B.G. She cannot move. WANDA (a gasp) No!! Again the sharp KNOCK. 28. ANGLE WIDENS TO INCLUDE BELDON BELDON There — it's probably nothing to fear. You'd better answer it. This is the last thing in the world that Wanda wants to do. She is convinced beyond reason that Mr. Death is standing on her doorstep. With a tremendous effort of will she takes a step toward the door. BELDON That's right— go ahead. She looks over her shoulder in despair. She takes another step. 33. CLOSE SHOT WANDA Falling back in terror. She stares. 34. HER POV THE NIGHT CHAIN The force has loosened the attachment to the door frame. One of the screws is missing and the rest are loose. The attach- ment has pulled part-way free of the ancient wood. 35. CAMERA ZOOMS INTO A CLOSE-UP WANDA 36. CLOSE SHOT BELDON Startled concern. 37. CLOSE SHOT THE FACE An angry expression. MAN I'm sorry, lady, but I have my orders. I can't fool around any longer. He tries to push the door from between them. The night chain TWILIGHT ZONE 83 !v NOTHING IN THE DARK gives way with a splintering sound. The door swings wide. 38. ANGLE TO INCLUDE WANDA MAN He takes a step into the room. Wanda cannot move. She is stricken into immobility by her terror. The man takes anoth- er step. With a wild flutter of eyelids, she slumps to the floor. The man reacts with surprise and bends over her. His hands poise over her. 39. CLOSE SHOT HIS HANDS As they touch her shoulders. FADE TO BLACK. BILLBOARD SECOND COMMERCIAL ACT II FADE IN: 40. INTERIOR APARTMENT CLOSE SHOT WANDA . DAY She is unconscious on the floor. The man bends over her, his expression unreadable. He takes her wrist and feels for a pulse. 41. ANGLE ON BELDON Watching intently. Apparently the man has not seen him yet. 42. ANOTHER ANGLE MAN WANDA BELDON IN B.G. The man hunkers down and picks Wanda up. He carries her to the bed, props up her head with a pillow, smooths back her hair. 43. CLOSE ON WANDA Still and pale. 44. CLOSE SHOT MAN Looking down on her. 45. TWO SHOT Wanda stirs, a frightened moan, her eyes open. It takes her a few seconds to orient herself. Abruptly she realizes what has happened. MAN Easy, lady. Wanda tries to pull away from him. MAN (CONT'D) Just lie quiet till you get your strength back. The man takes a bandanna out of his pocket and swabs at his forehead. MAN (CONT'D) You gave me quite a scare when you caved in like that. Wanda looks down at herself. WANDA (wonderingly) And still I live .... She looks at the man, confused. MAN (apologetically) You got to understand, ma'am. I don't get no pleasure out of busting down doors, but you don't seem to savvy how important this is. I got a crew and equipment coming in an hour to pull this tenement down. (he looks about the room with distaste) Begging your pardon, but it's long over- due. I'm surprised it's still standing. He has moved aside so that she can sit up. WANDA You really aren't Mr. Death. . .? MAN I don't know what you're talking about. All I know is I got a contract to demolish this row of buildings. Everybody else moved out long ago. Until the other day I thought this building was deserted. I seen them windows boarded up and I figured you moved when the rest of them did. Wanda gives him a stricken look. WANDA You want me to go outside? To leave here. But I can't. Don't you see? The man shakes his head at her obstinacy. MAN (patiently) You were notified months ago, right? I'm just trying to do my job. These buildings were condemned by the city and I'm the one who's got to tear them down. WANDA How can you? MAN (exasperated) The building is old — run clown. I can see how you could get attached to it and not want to see it destroyed, but when a build- ing is old and unsafe it's got to come down to make room for new buildings. That's life, lady. The old has to make room for the new. (a change of tone — softer) People ask me why I do what I do — de- stroy things, but in a way I'm not a de- stroyer at all. I just clear the ground so 84 TWILIGHT ZONE other people can create. In a way I help them do it. The man shrugs self-consciously. MAN (CONT'D) Look around. It's the way things are. Trees fall and new ones grow out of the same ground. Animals give way to new animals and even people step aside when it's time. 46. CLOSE SHOT WANDA She shakes her head stubbornly. WANDA I won't. She looks o.s. WANDA (CONT'D) (with fright) The door, . . . 47. HER POV THE DOOR It stands open, sunlight streaming onto the warped floor. 48. ANGLE ON WANDA As she gets quickly to her feet and goes to the door. She swings it closed and reaches for the bolt. The man has fol- lowed her and as he sees her intention he puts out a restrain- ing hand. MAN (firmly) No need for that. What's the sense locking a door that won't be here in an hour? If you got any possessions you want to keep, I'd move them out of here. I'll help you. When she hesitates, his tone hardens. MAN (CONT'D) I been trying to go easy but if you insist on staying here I'll have to call a cop. Please cooperate, lady. At the mention of a cop, a thought occurs to Wanda. Her confusion vanishes. WANDA Of course. . . . 49. ANOTHER ANGLE TO INCLUDE BELDON He is propped up on one elbow regarding them. Wanda crosses to him followed by the man. WANDA (to Beldon) Explain to him. Tell him the reason I can't go out there. You'll help me, won't you? Beldon looks up at the man. MAN (confused) What are you doing? Who are you talking to? He looks down at Beldon blankly. WANDA Mr. Beldon is a policeman. He'll explain it to you. MAN Mr. Beldon? Are you all right, lady? (he eyes her suspiciously) I tried to be as gentle as I could. WANDA (to Beldon) Please tell him. _ BY GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON The man looks from Wanda to Beldon. He begins to edge away. He pauses at the door. MAN I m sorry, lady, but if you're still here when the crew arrives. 111 have to call a cop. He looks back at the couch and shrugs. He exits. Wanda looks curiously at Beldon. WANDA Why didn't you help me? I thought you understood. She turns away and suddenly pauses. A hideous thought has occurred to her. 50. CLOSE SHOT HER FACE An abrupt transition from mild annoyance to sickening terror. 51. CLOSE SHOT BELDON He knows the jig is up. 52. TWO SHOT As Wanda whirls. Her breath hisses between her teeth WANDA (accusing) You!! He looked right at you and didn't see you . . . ! (realization) No!! Beldon lowers his eyes. He swallows. He didn't want it to happen like this. BELDON (gently) Look in the mirror, Wanda. 53. CLOSE UP WANDA * She turns her head toward her cracked mirror. 54. WANDA'S POV TO MIRROR She can see the couch on which Beldon lies. It is empty. 55. MEDIUM SHOT AS WANDA TURNS BACK TO BELDON WANDA (shrill horror) You tricked me! (disbelief) You tricked me. . . ! It was you all the time. BELDON (softly) Yes — I tricked you. WANDA (rigid) But why? Once I let you inside you could have taken me anytime and yet you didn't. You acted— nice. You made me trust you. Beldon nods. BELDON I had to make you understand. Confused silence. BELDON (CONT'D) (soft) Am I really so frightening? Am I really so bad? Wanda cocks her head. She isn't sure she understands. TWILIGHT ZONE 85 NOTHING IN THE DARK BELDON (CONT'D) You've talked with me, confided in me. Have I taken advantage of you? Have I tried to hurt you? Wanda reacts, puzzled. Her initial terror has subsided a bit. What is he talking about? She has penetrated his secret and yet he continues to act as before. She relaxes her guard a trifle. BELDON (CONT'D) It's not me you're frightened of— you un- derstand me. What frightens you is the unknown. What frightens you is the land from which no traveler returns. Wanda's face shows a flare of apprehension. BELDON (CONT'D) (reassuring) You needn't be afraid. He rises from the couch— all signs of his recent weakness gone— and moves toward her. His face is relaxed and friendly. WANDA (shrinking back) But 1 am afraid. BELDON The running is over and it's time to rest. Give me your hand. He holds out his hand. WANDA (a cry) But I don't want to die! BELDON (soothingly) And you didn't want to live. You struggled against it till you were blue and the doctor had to slap you firmly to make you breathe. And you did. You grew accustomed to it and found it good. It was natural and right and now it is done. (pleading) Trust me. Wanda backs against the wall. WANDA No! No. . . ! His hand trembles before her. She looks at it with horror. Then she looks at his eyes. 56. CLOSE SHOT BELDON His eyes quiet— steady— friendly. 57. CLOSE SHOT WANDA Her confusion is stark and pitiful. 58. TWO SHOT TIGHT BELDON (warm) Mother, give me your hand. Looking at him, seeing the quietness in his eyes, her expres- sion softens. Her hand trembles toward his. She tenses her- self for a shock as her hand touches his. Nothing happens. She looks questioningly at him. BELDON You see? No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end — is the beginning. Beldon smiles warmly and turns away. WANDA But when will it happen? When will we go? Beldon turns toward her and points o.s. BELDON Go. . .7 Look! 59. CLOSE SHOT WANDA Awe and wonder. 60. ANGLE ON COUCH HER POV On it we see the body of Wanda herself. Her hands are crossed on her chest in an attitude of peace, her eyes closed, her face serene. BELDON'S VOICE We have already begun. 61. CLOSE SHOT WANDA Reacting. A note of excitement. 62. CLOSE SHOT BELDON Smiling, at ease. 63. TWO SHOT He holds out his arm gallantly. She timidly takes it. They turn toward the door. 64. FULL SHOT (SILENT) The ugly room. In background we see Wanda turn to Beldon eagerly. They are in animated conversation like old friends as Beldon opens the door at the far end of the room. The LIGHTS go down in the ugly room as they pass through the door into the white, bright sunlight beyond. The door cuts a blazing hole in the blackness. SERLING'S VOICE There is nothing in the dark that wasn't there when the light was on. Proven in part by this brief excursion through the strange geography of The Twilight Zone. SLOWLY FADE TO BLACK THE END ■ 86 TWILIGHT ZONE TZ3: Differing Visions THE ZONE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24 Twilight Zone, I find I am strangely un- sure what to say. It is, I suppose, in- dicative of the melancholy that comes with the conclusion of any season of a television series. The preceding year- plus was a mad, wonderful parade of deadlines and frantic writing and non- stop work. Then, one day, it just stops. The only question now is whether it will pick up again anytime in the near future. It's my understanding that MGM/ UA, desiring the thirty episodes we did only to fill out its syndication package, and currently in the throes of a finan- cial and management crisis, may not choose to commission any further epi- sodes, despite TZ3' s success in the rat- ings. (Their interest, it seems, is in long- term syndication, not short-term ratings.) Now, it's possible that this attitude may change (miracles, I'm told, do occur) but at this time, it seems that our best bet for another season — call it “TZ3.5", if you will — is to get back on CBS. Failing that, this could well be the final run for The Twilight Zone, until some uncertain day, years down the road, when someone at the network de- cides that the time has come to once again open the door to the wonders and eccentric residents of the Twilight Zone. George Clayton Johnson told me a few weeks ago that he believes it will come again, someday. He says that the concept is eternal, that the fires of im- agination that bum at the heart of the Twilight Zone cannot be long extin- guished. Somewhere, somehow, some- day, it will return. I hope he's right. Because whether I'm a part of it or not, a part of the Twilight Zone is now in me. Spending time in the Zone over the last year-plus has this tendency to make one believe in miracles, and the remarkable power of the human being singular to create magic from dust, to elevate the human condition to a state of dignity and self-realization, to say something of value in a medium chroni- cally undervalued. One way or another. The Twilight Zone will survive. Because where it is, those who would erase it, those who come armored in suits and sober sensi- bilities and bottom-line perspectives, cannot enter. It was a heck of a time. It was one wild ride. And I'm honored to have been a part of it, to have shared in its magic by simple proximity. Thank you, and goodnight, from. . .The Twilight Zone. ■ After reviewing the article "Return of the Zone'' [December 1988] we feel you owe it to your readers to present a more balanced view of the internal workings of the show, particularly in the critical development period. If one were to take the article at face value, one would assume that TZ3 should be called the "J. Michael Strac- zynski Show." While Joe may be a good writer and story editor, we beg to differ with his view. Let us begin by saying that the de- velopment of the show was, through- out, a team process, as mandated by the Executive Producer Mark Shelmer- dine. As story editors on an equal foot- ing with Straczynski, we brought a lot to that process. We co-wrote the writer's bible, known as "The Vision," with Straczynski, based on Shelmerdine's orig- inal draft. In addition, we wrote several highly praised episodes, and were inti- mately involved in setting the show's tone and direction. In his article, Straczynski made reference to us as writers "whose back- grounds were primarily in sitcom writ- ing and who were eventually let go." We resent the implication that our writ- ing and contribution to the show as story editors were in some way lacking and that we left the show under a cloud. Nothing could be further from the truth. When the term of our contract came to an end, we were reassigned by Mark Shelmerdine to assist in the development of another television show. We are still employed by London Films in that ca- pacity, and, are happy to report that as recently as October 7, 1988, we were still doing last - minute rewrites on TZ3 scripts currently in production. Paul Chitlik Jeremy Bertrand Finch Los Angeles, CA /. Michael Straczynski had this re- sponse. — Ed. On the issue of the series bible "Vision," the log of meetings and recorded drafts on file contradicts Finch and Chitlik. Our first meeting on this issue was Oc- tober 13, 1987. I arrived at that meeting with a twelve-page bible, which I had written entierly by myself, based on a one-page note from producer Mark Shel- merdine given to me when I was first hired. No input by them whatsoever had been made into that draft. At the request of the producer, I shortened the bible (again without their input) and delivered the revised draft on October 23. Finch and Chitlik asked to review their contribution to that draft (as reflected in the drafts available at the office) which amounted to two sen- tences, one of which was, "The magic should come in early." That, and that alone, is the extent of their involvement in the writing of the series bible. The script they mention editing on October 7, 1988, was one written by two friends of theirs, which the produc- er and I had already decided to jettison. They continued to edit it strictly on their own, out of a desire to revive their friends' script for personal reasons. Re- garding their claims that they were sim- ply "transferred," anyone familiar with television can testify that you aren't just "transferred" off a going series in the middle of production in order to de- velop a purely speculative project. They were not "transferred." The producer's direct, verbatim comment to me was, "They're not working out; I'm going to have to let them go." Any subsequent arrangement was due to the producer's laudable desire not to leave them finan- cially high-and-dry. Finally, it is worth noting that Finch and Chitlik wrote only five scripts, the minimum number which the producer had to purchase under their contract. I insisted that my contract require only one script assignment. If I got more, I wanted it fo be because I earned them, and for no other reason— and my name appears on eleven episodes. It's hard to determine where they derive the "highly praised" part of their statement. If they are referring to outside reviews, only one of their scripts has aired as I write this, to absolutely no reviews what- soever. The only reviews of the show, quoted in an earlier column, were in direct response to an episode written by me and Haskell Barkin ("The Curi- ous Case of Edgar Witherspoon"). I do, however, strongly encourage viewers to watch the remaining four episodes by Finch and Chitlik ("The Trunk," "Stranger in Possum Meadows," "Father and Son Game" and "Room 2426") so that their contributions to the show can be weighed on their own mer- its. It is said that failure is an orphan, and success has many fathers. But in the final analysis, claims and counter- claims are more or less meaningless, as are testimonials or articles written by me or anyone else. What endures is the judgment of viewers on the quality of the episodes, individually and collec- tively. . .which is exactly as it should be. J. Michael Straczynski Los Angeles, CA TWILIGHT ZONE 87 BY THE NUMBERS As we've come to expect, Hollywood will offer us a rash of sequels in the next several months. Sigourney Weaver, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and the whole crew will be back for Columbia's Ghostbusters II: The Last of the Ghostbusters (due in July). William Shatner has tried his hand at directing Star Trek V: The Final Fron- tier (scheduled for release June 9), which he decided to make without the light-hearted — and sometimes heavy-handed — camp of its predeces- sor. You've probably already seen at A TALL TALE: Eric Idle and company in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Coming soon— yeah, that’s the ticket— real soon. least the trailer for The Fly II (I Was a Teenage Insect?) starring Mask's Eric Stoltz, as the kid who crawls out of his cocoon, and Spaceballs's Daph- ne Zuniga. Fright Night II, with more credible monsters than number one but not as many chuckles, was re- leased by N.C. /Vista in February. Robocop II should be out from Orion sometime this fall. Halloween V is scheduled for release in October, of course, although I wish they'd put this Michael guy to rest already. But on an exciting note, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery should make a fabulous team in Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade (scheduled for May 24). Connery plays Indy's dad. FASHIONS IN FANTASY In the wake of Willow, it seems fan- tasy film mongers might finally be ready to give the old quest epic a new turn, or to look on the book- shelves for inspiration. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (not yet scheduled for release by Atlantic) is the film ver- sion of Joan Aiken's wonderful Grimm-like children's novel, starring Stephanie Beacham (villainess ex- traordinaire of Colbys fame) as the evil stepmother figure. Angelica Huston stars in Witches (due in May from Warner Brothers), directed by Nicholas ( The Man Who Fell to Earth ) Roeg and based on Roald Dahl's novel. Other fantasymongers are going for new angles on old themes — like witchhunting with a time -travel twist, in New World's Warlock (due in May). This film will have some splat- ter, a lot of darkness, and a reason- ably solid cast: Gothic's Julian Sands as the evil seventeenth-century war- lock, Withnail and I's Richard E. Grant as the witch-hunter, and Lori ’( Footloose ) Singer as the love interest. And at last Terry ( Monty Python's Flying Circus, Brazil ) Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which we told you about ages ago, and which may be the longest-delayed fantasy film on record, is coming to a theater near you. It was released in Germany to moderate success and should be here in March. And speak- ing of off-the-wall genre flicks, check out Young Einstein (released in Febru- ary), afWarner Brothers film, pro- duced, directed, and written by an Australian comic star named Yahoo Serious (seriously!). Also look for How to Get Ahead in Advertising (now playing), a comedy in which Warlock's Richard Grant grows another head as a result of a nasty skin condition. THE WRITE STUFF Some of the print writers we know are giving Tinseltown their best shot -with varying results. After wran- gling with 20th Century Fox a couple of years back over the film version of his novel Millenium, John Varley (see his story "Just Another Perfect Day" on p. 26 of this issue) said a vehement good-bye to Hollywood. The film, starring Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd, finally has been scheduled for April release. We hear cyberpunk-meister William (Neuromancer) Gibson's script for the third Alien film (not yet scheduled) is a real corker. Also Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark ) is scheduled to do Gib- son's New Rose Hotel (a cyberpunk story first published in Omni), after she wraps Vestron's new cop movie Blue Steel. "Splat packer" David J. Schow is writing for the TV series Freddy's Nightmares. Also look for many fun- ny writer cameos in The Laughing Dead, a comedy gore flick produced by Somtow Sucharitkul (aka S.P. Somtow), in which Ed Bryant gets crushed by a bus. ^ SANDS OF TIME: Gothic’s Julian Sands plays a dapper- but-nasty century-hopping villain in Warlock. © 1989 NEW WORLD ENTERPRISES ▼ THE FINAL FRONTIER? William Shatner directing a Klingon in Star Trek V. But is it really the last hurrah? ■EPING UP WITH THE NESES: Indiana Jones and the st Crusade— Harrison Ford and an Connery play “hunk and son.’ 989 LUCASFILM LTD. © 1989 PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORP. r - 4 WET AND WILD Director John Cameron and producer Gale Ann Hurd are hard at work on The Abyss (set for July 4th release). It promises to be the best of a new wave of aqua-monster sf/horror films. As in The Terminator and Aliens, Cameron will set the visual tone of the film with his neat designs for sets, weapons, and whatever other futuristic doo-dads the story de- mands. But get out your water wings for the other "wet films" this year. Deep Star Six (released in January), a hare-brained undersea Alien clone complete with tacky prehistoric lob- ster, should have deep-sixed itself at the box office by now. There's more hope for MGM's Leviathan (released March 17), which appears to be a fishy clone of John Carpenter's The Thing with high production values. It stars Peter Weller (Robocop) and Richard Crenna. INNER TUBE The news from the small screen looks promising. For those of you who love fifties-style sf revamps like War of the Worlds, J. Michael Straczynski is working on a new made-for-syndi- cation version of V for Warner Brothers. I hope the lizard-people still get to eat those chocolate rats and tarantulas. And more aliens are com- ing to TV. Word is out that there's a syndicated Invasion of the Body Snatchers series in the works. On the classy side of TV syndica- tion, Shelley Duvall (producer of Showtime's Fairie Tale Theater) is working up a Nightmare Classics an- thology series for Showtime. She'll be dramatizing a few Poe stories and several other famous horror tales. Joe Straczynski is adapting Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde for the series. ^ BOY GENIUS: Australian comic Yahoo Serious writes, directs, and stars in Young Einstein, a wacky, down-under, historical fantasy. © 1989 PARAMOUNT PICTURES ▲ MATERIAL GHOULS: Fred Gwynne (alias Herman Munster) stars in Pet Sematary. Madonna- video-alumna Mary Lambert replaced George Romero ( Night of the Living Dead) as director of King’s latest tilt at Hollywood. 99 TWILIGHT ZONE A CYBER-SPLAT!: Vincent Klyn has flesh ap-peel as Cyborg’s leading body-disintegrating pirate. ■ * wSxsiitbm# COMIC RELIEF On the heels of Roger Rabbit, a passle of cartoon and comic book heroes, from Bullwinkle's badguys Boris and Natasha (an Orion release, starring Sally Kellerman), to Batman and Spider-man, will soon be blazing across the silver screen. I'm sure all you mulch mavens will be glad to know that the Swamp Thing ( Return of the Swamp Thing, no distributor yet ) will be back, complete with Louis Jourdan as the reanimated and cloned Dr. Arcane. (Old villains - and actors — never die.) While we write this, Warner Brothers' much-awaited Batman, star- ring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Kim Basinger is still in production, having experienced much technical difficulty. Script changes have abounded on this film. We hope they work it out soon — they've promised to release it in July. Here's one big scoop for us anima- tion lovers: Steven Spielberg has made an agreement with Warner Brothers to produce/direct some new cartoons, featuring the studio's classic characters. More power to him (as if he needs it). And Speaking of power, even though the Revlon Corporation bought Marvel Comics, thanks to a Cannon/ New World Pictures agreement, you can still expect to see Spider-man and Captain America movies in future months. Another Cannon project, Masters of the Universe II, got scrapped after they built the sets and arranged for big-time special effects. They found a "cyber-splat" script, re- named it Cyborg, and four weeks later. Cannon had a movie. With its flesh-dissolving pirates and non-stop fight sequences. Cyborg might make a good Saturday-night rental once it gets to video. (Which will be soon; it was released in February.) | ◄ CREEP FROM THE DEEP: Amands Pays and Peter Weller try to slay a suspiciously Thingy-\ooking thing in Leviathan. TWILIGHT ZONE 91 © 1988 UNIVERSAL PICTURES SCREEN CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17 DON’T WORRY, BE PASSIVE: They Live’s aliens just want obedience, and perhaps some skin cream. ness to a level that a contemporary son- of-a-bitch — one toughened as a child by a technology that brought him visions of other children being slaughtered in Vietnam as he ate his TV dinners — would be able to understand. Unfortunately for the movie, the first of the Christmas Spirits is so much the best of them all, that the others, while quite good, are a bit of a let- down. The Ghost of Christmas Past is played with lethal joy and sublime vi- ciousness by dinky Carol Kane (I tell you, she was named for this movie!), all dolled up in a frothy little fairy dress and wearing teensy, filmy wings just like White Rock girl on the soda water bottles. She wears a mincing, wincey little smile, and crinkles her eyes up ever so jolly, and the first thing she does to Murray, to indicate she feels his mode of life does not live up to her expecta- tions of loving humanity and Christian forgiveness, is to sail across the room on her fluttering wings and give him a resounding wallop in the genitals. She thus demonstrates, without ado or bothersome subtlety, her basic schtick, which is that while she may be light as a feather, have the bones of a tiny spar- row, and skin of a near translucent paleness sprinkled with sparkly stars, she hits with the authority, and the same sickening thud, of a Mike Tyson. The whole routine between her and Murray— who plays off her with a snarling skill also lovely to behold — is something I will treasure and chuckle over for many Christmases to come. If you find your brotherly love slipping a little, friend, take a tip from your kind- ly old reviewer and see this prime ex- ample of moral instruction. The Ghost of Christmas Present is played with obvious enjoyment by David Johansen (aka "Buster Poindex- ter") as a skillfully scruffy cab driver. While his ectoplasmic Fifties cab with its cruddy Christmas decorations may not be quite up to sweet, dear little Carol (nothing is quite up to our Carol), it may be the second-best thing in the movie as it whizzes through darkness and delivery trucks with equal abandon. In defiance of convention, the death's-head skull of The Ghost of Christmas Future is not hidden — the movie is firmly dedicated to stamping out understatement whenever possible — and gets bigger and bigger and BIG- GER. The Marley-style ghost is played by John Forsythe (whose voice is, of course, perfect for a television execu- tive) in a mouldy golfer's outfit (he died in retirement on the links) with, frank- ly, rather disappointing dead-person makeup. Considering the generally high level of funny horrific effects in the movie. I'd have expected the makeup artists to have a little more imaginative fun with old Marley's rotting face. But, hey, is that in the Christmas spirit7 Go see the movie, gentle read- ers, even if it's got a few kinky little drawbacks, and, like, try to love your fellow man, okay? It's that or a holly stake through the heart next year, friend. Pull Down the Shades Old John Carpenter keeps hammering them out, and some are better than others. They Live (Universal) is not one of his best, but it does have a promising start and the first gropings of a fine paranoid film. The notion he's playing with is the comfy old idea that this mess we're in is really not our fault. You see, it isn't that we've been greedy and thoughtless and stupid and all that stuff. That isn't why the world is almost busted and our genes are bent out of whack— it's these here dam thangs, folks, these terrible, inhu- man critters from outer space that have put us in our present position. It's those devils made us do it! Of course, true to the tradition of this sort of story, poor, old, innocent mankind-at-large has no idea it's being preyed upon. But this film has a little group of human rebels who know the truth. They're plotting to free the rest of us and, wonder of wonders, (and here's the cute point and the only justification for the movie) have developed sunglass- es that enable their wearers to see the alien entities for what they are, namely corpsey-looking creatures with bulging metal eyes. A wandering construction worker, the very big Roddy Piper, comes across a set of these glasses and, after seeing how ugly and all-pervasive the aliens are, determinedly goes after them until he discovers the rebel group. Things go almost exactly the way they would if you left off reading this article and spent five minutes or so dreaming up the scenario yourself, except that you'd have to write in an endless (supposedly funny) fight between Piper and his equally huge pal Keith David, and end it with a really remarkably unconvinc- ing wrap-up— even for this genre. Actu- ally, I'm sure you're far too smart to come up with an ending as dumb as the one in the movie, so I'll break my usual policy of not giving away the ending and tell it to you in order to save you whatever exorbitant price the theaters and/or cassette renters are charging in your area. (If you want, you can stop here and try to figure it out, sort of like a crossword puzzle, before reading on and seeing if you can actually dream as poorly as a Hollywood hack.) 92 TWILIGHT ZONE It turns out that the aliens have a technology so far in advance of ours it's like to make you sick with envy. They even have a wonderful gadget that transports you instantly to any place in the universe you want to go — there's a swell glimpse of it in action with a huge, ringed planet hanging in the sky. And it's presented so prettily by Carpenter that I decided then and there, to hell with the humans; I'll join up with that other bunch! These self- same high-tech aliens manage to main- tain their fiendish disguise and look pretty, just like us, only because of one solitary solo little tinsy gadget in the whole entire world, a kind of sparky lava lamp mounted all by itself and ex- posed to the elements on the roof of a building. Well, wouldn't you know it! Big old Rowdy Roddy Piper comes across it entirely by accident and shoots it with his last bullet and -that's it, that's all it takes! — the aliens are re- vealed to us for what they are, so now we can destroy them and live sensibly like we wanted to do all along. Totally awesome, right? I just know, if you played the game, that your ending had to be better than that. Sympathy for the Cenobites A while back I reviewed Clive Barker's Hellraiser in this column and opined that he had made a very promising start as a director of scary movies. I stay with that, but, after seeing Hell- bound: Hellraiser II (New World Pic- tures), I am afraid that I must regretful- ly add that he has unfortunately followed that up by making a noticeably bad de- but as a producer. In Hellhound, which is, indeed, an attempt to carry on with the gory events commenced in Hellraiser, Barker has entrusted his story to one Peter Atkins, screenwriter, and one Tony Ran- del, director. (Not the winsome TV comic, by the way. I had a brief mo- ment myself of wondering how a fellow like that had ever managed to get him- self involved in a project like this!) Friends, Barker's faith in them was ill- placed, and his attention to their doings either minimal or misguided, because nearly everything that could have gone wrong in Hellraiser (and which was, very much to his credit, narrowly avoided by Barker) does go wrong in Hellhound, and in precisely the ways you were happily relieved to see it not going wrong in the original effort. I suppose the most obvious con- trast between the two Hellraisers is in the heavy-handed humor which was, in the original, neatly sardonic and dry in order to offer quiet and skillful counter- point to the wash of blood all about. In Hellhound, an initial attempt is made to deliver the same kind of wit, but it falls apart with increasing speed, and it soon degenerates into such a shambles that in the end we are treated to the odd spectacle of increasingly bizarre monsters delivering Henny Youngman jokes. (The whole thing's not unlike watching a cheap car collapsing into sil- ly fragments as it rolls down the side of a hill.) It doesn't quite get to; "Take my tentacles . . please!" They don't get that good, actually -but they reach for it. There are some promising aspects to the film, but they are, each and every one, thoroughly sabotaged in the end. Kenneth Cranham, for instance, is quite good at the start playing a slick, purring, deeply perverted doctor who has managed to get himself a sanitari- um full of victims to play horrible games with. (This includes a bunch of really super crazies kept in a row of hidden cells in the basement next to the furnace.) But he is soon buried under so much makeup that almost anyone would do (and maybe did, who knows?), and his lines decline into the above- mentioned one-liners as well. Really quite a pity. The horrible creatures are over- done from the start. In the original there was a nice lean sparseness about them, and they were photographed hunched in lots of menacing shadow. In this unfortunate sequel, however, we see them spread-eagled in bright light like bugs. (I suppose the effects people were so proud they didn't want you to miss a thing.) They are fat and sprawl- ing and out of shape. They don't scare you, as they are supposed to do during the first part, and they don't make you laugh, as they try to do in the last part. (At least , I think they are trying to make you laugh.) The worst thing about the film, the really unforgiveable bit, is what it does with the truly gruesome notion of the Cenobites, a race of absolutely horrid entities who can get into your world and/or pull you into theirs and whose whole, sole purpose and delight in life is to hideously torture you with the ab- solute latest and most trendy S&M devices until you have been turned into dinky bits of gory flesh. Hellhound takes these hideous creations and turns the concept around and, by God, actu- ally sentimentalizes it, hard as that may be to believe, by revealing that they are not a ghastly, ghoulish race at all, but just a bunch of poor, misunderstood humans who made the perfectly under- standable mistake of getting interested in those tricky little puzzle boxes, poor dears. What with one thing leading to another, before they knew it, there they were looking ugly with all those nails in their faces and suchlike, and finding themselves torturing all those people - not that they really wanted to do it deep down inside, of course, and, real- ly, isn't it a shame? So I would suggest, most earnestly and sincerely, that Barker get out of the producing business and back into the directing business, and, for heaven's sake, stop listening to all that bad ad- vice! ■ HOOKS AND BLADDERS; Hellhound’s Kenneth Cranham Ceno-bites off more than he can chew. TWILIGHT ZONE 93 © 1988 NEW WORLD ENTERPRISES ft >. ' It BOOKS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 0-380-75500-9). Here are ten new sto- ries plus four classic reprints, all horroc tales taking place in hot, sweaty climes. The reprints include such work as Avram Davidson's "Where Do You Live, Queen Esther?", a concise, concentrated tale of benign voodoo, aggressive white ignor- nance, and duppy death. The originals range over a wide spectrum, from Gene Wolfe's "Houston, 1942," an eerie story of twisted child- hood, to Charles Sheffield's "Dead Meat," an adventure of lust and murder set in Borneo that is a lineal descendant of the sort of men's magazine tale Harlan Ellison and many others used to write in the Fifties. Steve Rasnic Tern contrib- utes "Grim Monkeys," a parable of chil- dren lost, set in Venezuela. Pat Cadi- gan's "It Was the Heat" is a lush, sweaty tale of the sensuality and decadence twining about a female executive visit- ing New Orleans. Other contributions include stories by Brian Aldiss, Ian Watson, George Alec Effinger, and others, as well as poetry by Robert Frazier and Bruce Boston. The uncreditqd cover painting is particularly notable, evok- ing, as it does, the same attractive air of class as the publisher's Latin Ameri- can fiction series. 2am Publications is an ambitious fledgling small press in the Midwest. They have just published a chapbook called Wishes and Fears by David Starkey (2am Publications, P.O. Box 6754, Rock- ford, IL 61125-1754, $4.95, 48 pp„ ISBN 0-937491-01-2). This perfect-bound trade paperback contains an original novelette about a young boy who lives with his embittered and abandoned mother, loves animals, and one day discovers a wound- ed, chained griffin off in the woods. Befriending the unpredictable griffin leads to grim results as the legendary beast starts taking a stem accounting of those who have given the human boy grief. Although the book starts well in vintage Bradbury territory, it unfortu- nately mires itself in increasingly pe- destrian writing. Hard to tell whether it's author or publisher who believes that "strided" is the past tense of stride, and that a "wheel barrel" is synonymous with wheelbarrow. I don't mean to pick. What's more serious is that the poten- tially very human and affecting story of a boy who loves all helpless creatures funnels too rapidly into an artificially forced ending where the frisson — rather than generating from the artful placement of the writer's story elements — comes instead from a clumsily structured oh- my-God-so-fhof's-what's-going-on revel- ation, involving the reading of a con- venient book. Mr. Starkey demon- strates real promise, but perhaps he is not yet ready for a book all to himself where any weakness is more likely to call attention to itself. If David Starkey evokes a bit of Bradbury as Wishes and Fears start off. Brad Strickland conjures a wonderful Michael Bishop-style landscape in Shad- owshow (Onyx Books, $3.95, 372 pp., ISBN 0-451-40109-3). Shadowshow is set in the smalltown Georgia of 1957. Sputnik's up there and folks are wor- ried. In the little town of Gaither, yet another burg with a hideous secret, the mysteries stranger, Athaniel Badon, comes to town to buy the boarded-up State Theatre. The previous owner now en- dures an institution where author Strick- land, in a wonderful cameo of cinemat- ic hell, describes the inner content of the character's catatonia: "How can they know that he watches insane, horrify- ing, disjointed Hopalong Cassidy movies in his head all the time now?" If all the writing in this novel were that brilliant, this review would be one long rave. Sadly, while Shadowshow is pleas- ant enough, it mostly affords the plea- sure of the overly familiar. I've seen all this before. So have you. It's not terri- bly mysterious why the malevolent Mr. Badon's back in town. The device of the midnight show where movie patrons get to preview the (usually) awful acts they're going to commit doesn't come through as either all that fresh or even terribly integral to the plot. Maybe that's the problem: focus. All the elements of the big, best-selling, point-of-purchase horror bonanza are here. Shadowshow' s got atmosphere. It's got a serviceable but unsurprising plot. It's got one of those lengthy cast lists that looks as long as the passenger manifest for the Titanic Too many of the characters have labels pasted on their foreheads. Labels like "Lunch." Too often the gloss, the perfunctory, the superficial is the brush used to letter that label. Andy McCory, the duped Renfield-like hu- man minion of the nasty Mr. Badon, mostly twirls a metaphorical moustache, save for one scene toward the end when he seems genuinely affected by the death of his child. This is not to say that the other characters are intrinsical- ly dull or even uninteresting. It's just that they seem constantly struggling for air. Fresh air. This is another one where you strain and root for the author all the way; then finally pack it in and go out to the kitchen where you find the power's gone off, the refrigerator's de- funct, and the beer's turned all warm. Finally, if you don't have a copy of J.G. Ballard's new story collection. Memories of the Space Age (Arkham House, $16.95, 216 pp., ISBN 0-87054- 157-9), your book collection — and your life — is incomplete. Got that? Memories is a perfect gem of a book, from the Max Ernst jacket and J.K. Potter interior il- lustrations to Ballard's octet of post- modern fictions about the dulling of edges, the bitter thwarting of expecta- tions, and the dying of the dream as the shattered fantasies of humanity's conquest of space litter the parched sands of Cape Canaveral. Ballard shows us devastated human wreckage lurching across the mindscapes in sto- ries as old as "The Cage of Sand" (1962), as recent as "The Man Who Walked on the Moon" (1985). By turns melancholy and obsessed, Ballard deals us resonances from a deck of archetypes. There is adventure here indeed — emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic Don't concern yourself that Memories of the Space Age will probably not be endorsed gleefully by the L-5 Society. ■ 94 TWILIGHT ZONE TERROR CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20 ing Dead, an audio dramatization from Simon & Schuster, is less successful. The narrator speaks infrequently, and when he does it is during the most climactic parts of the story. He has lines like ". . .exposing things that never should be seen by man." (I know I want to see them, and I assume you do, too.) The performers have a tendency to overact. I have seen people listen to this tape and quiver with suppressed giggles and excitement at the tacky pre- sentation, eating up every ridiculous mo- ment. So if you're the type who enjoys laughing at good, trashy horror, you'll love Night of the Living Dead. Now for the contemporary stuff. All the novels you've waited for in print are coming out on audio cassette almost as fast. The first part of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The Gunslinger, is still on the stands, and part two. The Drawing of the Three, was released in January by New Audio Library. The Dark Tower novels are all full-length readings by King himself. Just think: six hours and sixteen minutes of King's distinctive nasal voice. Actually it's a treat to hear an author read his or her own work, and King does a fine job with this series. For those of you who love Stephen King, his tapes are almost everywhere. The classic tales from Nightshift are available from Random House. Gramma is a good one to buy if you like child- hood fear, or if you like scaring little children. The Mist is probably one of the best King tapes around; it's com- pletely dramatized in "3-D" sound. When you're wearing earphones the three- hundred and sixty-degree sound repro- duction creates a spacial reality similar to the way your ears really hear— above, below, front, back, right, left. You can imagine how deliciously dis- gusting some horror effects are in 3-D sound. I didn't buy it at first, but after 1 heard a good ten-second 3-D stran- gling, I was sold. 3-D sound is especially fitting for The Mist. The producers strive for total realism, and it works. People scream and you can hear their voices fading away in the distance. Creatures fall from ceiling to floor, and you can actu- ally hear them splat below. And the mist itself. . .is alive, it creeps, crawls, and slithers. What created this unnatu- ral fog? The top secret government op- eration? Perhaps. It doesn't matter what caused it, all that matters is getting out. You and dozens of others are trapped in a supermarket, alone with a raving reli- gious freak, hungry children, a love interest— and tentacles. You won't last long inside, but outside is the mist, represented by a chilling audio sound effect. You can feel it all around, heavy, cold, and breathing .... Random House offers Annie Rice's tales of the undead: Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned. Si- mon & Schuster has V.C. Andrews's thriller Flowers in the Attic, the story of the perfect American family's plunge into a fairy tale-gone-mad. Also from Simon & Schuster is Dean R. Koontz's Lightning. This one will appeal to you folks who like a taste of science fiction in your horror. ("The first time light- ning strikes, it saves a life The sec- ond time lightning strikes, the terror starts. . . . The third time lightning strikes, hell breaks loose.") What en- sues is a suspenseful chase across the boundaries of time. Clive Barker is also available on tape. In fact. Barker reads his most fa- mous work. The Hellhound Heart -a tale of Hell and of the people who come to discover that dreadful place as a re- sult of the unbearable ennui they feel existing on earth. Earthly pleasures just aren't enough for these folks, and nei- ther are earthly pains. This is the tale that evolved into the films Hellraiser and Hellhound: Hellraiser II. If you en- joyed the films, I have a suspicion you will appreciate the tape even more. The tape includes some rather graphic and disturbing scenes that provide an extra ripeness to The Hellhound Heart. The Cenobites are not quite as hip as they were in the films: their skin is gnarled and their garb is less like that found in a death-rock club. But on tape. Barker's Hell becomes more sticky and damp than it was in the films, and more hor- rifically decadent. Another story of Hell from Barker is The Damnation Game, an abridged narration available from Books on Tape. It abounds in soul collecting, mind control and all that good stuff. By far the best sound effect I heard was on the Barker tape of The Inhuman Condi- tion, available through Simon & Schuster: A man graphically hits the pavement after a fourteen-story fall, along with hundreds of severed hands. Try doing that on the big screen. Get out your earphones for this one! That's just a sampling of the hor- rors available on audio. A larger selec- tion is listed at the end of this section. Since this sort of "dark" horror is so compelling, I have one piece of advice for you. Take your time and work slow- ly through the tapes. Start with one you can handle before testing the limits of your endurance. Bon voyage! ■ SKIFFY CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21 admit that since audio fiction reaches the ears, it ought to be appealing to them. A good audio should be able to make you ignore the shriek of metal on met- al. So argued my media kid, who has been spoiled by CD sound. When I listened to the first tape, the train wasn't too crowded, so my intellectual side was dominant. It chose to begin with the author-narrated tapes because, it reasoned, they should most closely reflect the author's work. The Writer’s Voice I put the banquet scene from Frank Herbert's Dune in the tape player and scanned the "liner notes," written by the author. He selected the banquet scene because he felt it best conveys the polit- ical theme of his novel. Though I agreed, it seemed to me that the excerpt would be baffling to anyone discovering Dune for the first time. Headphones on, I smiled knowingly and probably looked very thoughtful. Herbert's hard conson- ants and intense drone made the piece delightfully biting and witty. The men- tal calisthenics at the Atreides dinner table unfolded like a picture book. The media kid was entertained by most of it, and the intellectual felt enriched. Then I tried Theodore Sturgeon's "The Fabulous Idiot," a story from his novel. More Than Human. Again, both personas were happy. The intellectual loved heading the lush texture of Stur- geon's language in his gentle, uninflect- ed voice. And although the kid was tired of the hiss on these author-nar- rated tapes, she thought the fairy-tale atmosphere was really neat. The next time I pulled out my headphones for a listen, it was eight-forty-seven on some middle-of-the-week morning. I was one of far too many human sardines on the stone-still R train. The media child was really antsy. So I tossed her some upscale candy — Douglas (The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Adams, reading his new genre hybrid, Dirk Gently 's Holistic Detective Agency. I giggled and guffawed all the way to work— which was only slightly embarrassing on the subway, where wackiness is pret- ty normal. Adams has a wonderfully sardonic Monty Python-esque delivery, which makes his fabulously improbable concepts as believable as the evening news. On a sunny Saturday train ride to my_ parents' abode in New Jersey, my resident intellectual ruled; she ap- proached Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge, read by the man himself, with quiet reverence. But when it was over, the TV twelve-year-old complained. It's TWILIGHT ZONE 95 SKIFFY not that Asimov isn't a wonderful racon- teur, but he is from around these parts r and his rich New York accent made it hard for me to escape from the stench of the Meadowlands and into his epic of galactic politics. Even the aesthetic perfectionist objected; the form — the sound of his words — didn't seem suited to their content. Guiltily, I reach for an- other Asimovian effort. The Gods Them- selves, narrated by Gale Garnett. In surprise, the media kid woke up and pulled out her sentimental hankie. Asimov's squooshy energy-eating alien fighting to save the sun from supernova really touched my heart. Why? Well, the alien was involved in a perfectly messy, perfectly human love triangle. After hearing the author-narrated tapes, the intellectual purist was resting easy, feeling that audio could indeed be a safe place for sf. But the junk-food junkie kid was ready for— you guessed it— her next twenty-minute fix of enter- tainment. Maybe, she thought, the dra- matizations would be more like Star Trek, with actors and maybe some mu- sic or even cool sound effects. While she was busy contemplating this idea, though, the sneaky intellectual snatched up a classic The Sounds of Science It was H. G. Wells's The Time Machine — primaeval science fiction. The profes- sor in my head got nostalgic I pressed "play." And frowned. And began to chuckle. The tape started with electron- ic music— pulpy stuff like something out of Forbidden Planet. The narrator and actors began, speaking in that upper- crusty Brit accent John Cleese and Com- pany love to spoof. Then there was this cello riff sending me to foggy Victorian London. But then, as the Time Traveler sped into the future, the electronic mu- sic and the overacting zapped me right to the chilly plastic set of Space 1999. When the tape ended, I felt guilty for laughing. A classic shouldn't be campy. The smarty-pants purist returned, tsk- tsk-ing at the media kid, who snapped, "Oh, yeah7 Take this!" and shoved a hi- tech tape into the machine. Here it was, my first taste of true "state-of-the-art" audio, Isaac Asimov's brainchild , Robot City (written by poor Michael P. Kube-McDowell, whose name on the box is nearly microscopic). Its star, Peter MacNichol ( Sophie's Choice), sounded a little like Mark Hamill. (Ro- mantic sigh from the kid.) But most of all, the kid was in sound-effects ecstasy. Laser cannons blasted; robots clanked toward me; turbo lifts whirred down into the bowels of a space complex; spaceships whistled and hummed through the void. ("Hey, they can't really do that," admonished the intellectual, but the kid was having too much fun to lis- ten.) And this tape, I thought, was only the first in a series. The kid can't wait for the next one. My only complaint was that the evil alien had a vaguely Russian accent, throwing glasnost to the wind. Even so, the couch potato kid was psyched for more, picked out vol- ume one of The Omni Audio Experi- ence, and flipped it into the tape player. As you might guess from the title, this particular tape was set up in a magazine format. It includes a Ray Bradbury story from The Martian Chronicles, 'And The Moon Be Still as Bright" ("Gosh-wow," said the kid), and a Bradbury interview. Both halves of my brain went right for the story. And rose up to heaven. My resident intellec- tual remarked upon the fact that every- thing — special effects, music, acting, and narration was done subtly and with great respect for Bradbury's poetic style. The media kid just oohed and aahed at the yummy new-age music, which made fantastic pictures flash in my head. The intellectual enjoyed the interview, but thought, if these people can make au- dio fiction so well, why do anything else? The next Omni audio volume had Arthur C. Clarke's "Rescue Party" on it. In amazement, the mushy media kid pulled out the hankie again. A Clarke story that makes you cry? Never hap- pened to me before. The sound effects and the music, the excellent acting, all built a vivid landscape in my head, thrilling the kid. Then came the part of the story when humanity did, after all. find the gumption and good sense to save itself. This was it, I thought, wip- ing tears from my eyes, the reason 1 love science fiction. I dared the other subway travelers to stare at me. I was a nerd — and proud of it. My didactic purist was feeling ma- ternal; she patted the sobbing child on the head, wondering if all this emotion was too much for her. Knowing that Arthur C. Clarke is usually more nuts- and-boltsy, the intellectual decided to try another Clarke tape to calm the kid down. It was Random House's 2061: Odyssey Three. Although this presen- tation lacked the sound effects of the Omni cassette, the intellectual enjoyed herself, and the child was soothed by the transitional synthesizer chords. And as an added bonus, Frank Langella nar- rates this tape! My romantic media kid loved him in Dracula (love isn't quite the right word); he could probably sell her anything with that velvety voice. Langella also knows how to convey sci- ence fiction's sense of wonder. 2061 had just enough auditory sensuality to evoke the material's strange settings. Still, the way I felt about 2061 was nothing com- pared to my reaction to the last tape. In the Beginning Was the Word It was J.R.R. Tolkien reading his own works. The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring. Okay, I know this isn't science fiction, but the kid couldn't re- sist listening to it. And for giving in to her childish impatience, my internal in- tellectual was rewarded with a vivid, wondrous aesthetic experience. I'd like to talk more about the Tolkien tape here, but such a discussion will have to wait for another column. Suffice it to say that Tolkien brought me back to what the art of storytelling is all about: the power of the word to paint pictures, to impart compelling, archetypal tales. The tape proved to both of my perso- nas that the spoken language alone can have its own magic, its own music and "sound effects." But what prose it has to be, and what a voice the author/nar- rator has to have to impress the media- saturated kid in all of us. It is inevitable that as more publish- ing companies produce fiction on tape, they will use sound effects to cover up weaknesses in stories, just as movie makers use special effects these days. Still, since audio is a growing medium, I hope its producers will continue to ex- plore all of its sensual qualities and still keep my media-junkie self saying "Gol- ly Gee!" But both the media kid and the intellectual snob will vouch for this: You can't beat the punch of a good story. ■ 96 TWILIGHT ZONE DIMENSIONS OF SOUND To help you enter the audio dimension, we've listed a selection of some of the more interesting horror and sf recordings current- ly available. If you don't see what you're looking for here, write to the publishing companies for their catalogues or call them to order. You'll find the numbers and ad- dresses at the bottom of this page. HORROR Classics Bierce, Ambrose: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; Edited by Jonathan Katz; Performance by Eartha Kitt, James Gunn [CA] De Maupassant, Guy: Was it a Dream? [LL] Jacobs, W.W.: The Monkey 's Paw and The Interruption; Performance by Anthony Quayle 1CA] Lovecraft, H.P.: The Haunter of the Dark (abridged); Performance by David McCallum [CA] Poe, Edgar Allan: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Works; Performance by Basil Rathbone [CA] Poe, Edgar Allan: The Pit and the Pendu- lum and Other Works; Performance by Basil Rathbone [CA] Poe, Edgar Allan: The Masque of the Red Death and Other Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe; Performance by Basil Rathbone [CA] Shelley, Mary Wollenstonecraft: Franken- stein (abridged and fully dramatized) [SA] Shelley, Mary Wollenstonecraft: Franken- stein (unabridged) [BT] Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Performance by Anthony Quayle [CA] Stoker, Bram: Dracula [SA] Modern Andrews, V.C.: Flowers in the Attic; Perfor- mance by Dorothy Lyman [SS] Bloch, Robert: Psycho [LL] King, Stephen: Dark Tower: The Gunslinger [NA] King, Stephen: Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three [NA] King, Stephen: Gramma [RH] King, Stephen: The Mist (in 3-D sound); Fully dramatized [SS] King, Stephen: The Monkey [RH] King, Stephen: Nightshift [RH] King, Stephen: Skeleton Crew [RH] King, Stephen: Stories from Nightshift [RH] Koontz, Dean R.: Lightning; Performance by Peter Marinker [SS] Rice, Anne: Interview with the Vampire; Performance by F. Murray Abraham [RH] Rice, Anne: Queen of the Damned; Perfor- mance by Kate Nelligan [RH] Romero, George: Night of the Living Dead; Fully dramatized [RH] Cutting Edge Barker, Clive: The Damnation Game; Per- formance by Clive Barker [RH] Barker, Clive: The Hellhound Heart; Perfor- mance by Clive Barker [SS] Barker, Clive: The Body Politic (in 3-D sound); Performance by Kevin Conway [SS] Barker, Clive: The Inhuman Condition; Ful- ly dramatized [SS] Straub, Peter: Koko; Performance by James Woods [SS] Winter, Douglas E., editor: Prime Evil: A Taste for Blood; Performance by Ed Begley, Jr. [SS] SF Dawn Age Pioneers of Science Fiction: (Includes H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, fully drama- tized; Arthur C. Clarke's The Sentinel, a simple narration; and Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, fully dramatized) [SA] Verne, Jules: foumey to the Center of the Earth (abridged); Performance by James Mason [CA] Wells, H.G.: The War of the Worlds; Per- formance by Leonard Nimoy |CA] Grand Masters Asimoy Isaac: The Gods Themselves [RH] Asimov Isaac: Foundation's Edge (abridged w/music); Performance by Isaac Asimov [CA] Bradbury, Ray: The Illustrated Man; Perfor- mance by Leonard Nimoy [CA] Bradbury, Ray: The Small Assassin; Perfor- mance by Ray Bradbury [CA] Simak, Clifford: 'Aesop'' from City; Perfor- mance by Clifford Simak [CA] Sturgeon, Theodore: "The Fabulous Idiot" from More Than Human; Performance by Theodore Sturgeon [CA] Clarke, Arthur C.: Childhood's End [RH] Clarke, Arthur C.: Rendezvous With Rama [RH] Heinlein, Robert A.: The Green Hills of Earth and Space Jockey [RH] Heinlein, Robert A.: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; Performance by Robert Vaughn [SS] Herbert, Frank: Battles of Dune; Perfor- mance by Frank Herbert [CA] Herbert, Frank: Dune: The Banquet Scene; Performance by Frank Herbert [CA] Modern Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently s Holistic Detective Agency; Performance by Douglas Adams [SS] McIntyre, Vonda N.: Star Trek: The Entro- py Effect; Performance by George Takei and Leonard Nimoy [SS] McIntyre, Vonda N.: Star Trek: The First Adventure; Performance by Leonard Nimoy and George Takei [SS] McIntyre, Vonda N.: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; Performance by George Takei and Leonard Nimoy [SS] Hi-Tech Asimov, Isaac: Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Volume I: Odyssey by Michael P. Kube- McDowell; Performance by Peter Mac- Nichol [CA] The Omni Audio Experience, Vol. 1: In- cludes Ray Bradbury's 'And the Moon Be Still as Bright" and "Off Season" from The Martian Chronicles, and an inter- view with Ray Bradbury [OA] The Omni Audio Experience, Vol. 2: In- cludes Arthur C. Clarke's "Rescue Party" [OA] AUDIO PUBLISHERS The above listings are coded according to their publishers: BT Books on Tape, P.O. Box 7900, New- port Beach, CA 92658-7900; 1-800-626-3333 CA Caedmon, 1995 Broadway, New York, NY 10023; 1-800-638-3030; in Pennsyl- vania, 1-800-982-4377 LL Listening Library, One Park Avenue, Old Greenwich, CT 06870; 1-800-243-4504 LP Listen for Pleasure, One Columbia Drive, Niagara Falls, NY 14305; 1-800-451-9518 NA New American Audio, 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019; (201) 387-0600 OA Omni, Audio Dept., 200 N. 12th St., Newark, NJ 07107; 1-800-221-1777 RH Random House Audio, 201 E. 50th St., New York, NY 10022; 1-800-638-6460 SA Spoken Arts, P.O. Box 289, New Rochelle, NY 10802; 1-800-537-3617 SS - Simon & Schuster Audio, 1230 Ave- nue of the Americas, New York, NY 10021; (201) 767-5937 ■ TWILIGHT ZONE 97 CLASSIFIEDS TZ Classifieds bring results! Reaching nearly 350,000 readers,* they’re one of the magazine world's biggest bargains. The cost, payable in advance, is $2.00 per word ($2.50 for words FULLY CAPITALIZED). There is a twenty-word minimum; phone numbers with area codes count as one word. (No discounts are applicable.) Please send your ad copy, with payment, to: Twilight Zone Magazine, Att’n.: Belinda Davila, Classified Ad Dept., 401 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8802. Deadline for the Aug. 1989 issue is April 1, 1989; for the Oct. 1989 issue, it’s June 1, 1989. 'Globe Research Subscriber Survey, 1987 BOOKS/MAGAZINES/CATALOGS WORLD’S LARGEST OCCULT, Mystic arts, Witchcraft, Voodoo. 7000 curios, gifts, books. 3 fascinating 1989 catalogs, $1.00. By airmail, $2.00. 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Charles Beaumont, screenwriter 5J. Rod Serling, screenwriter 61. Robert Bloch, screenwriter 7H. Buck Houghton, producer 8B. Richard Donner, director 9C. Douglas Heyes, screenwriter 10G. Joe Alves, art director 11A. Steven Spielberg, director 12D. Jeannot Szwarc, director BONUS QUESTION: PATTERNS 98 TWILIGHT ZONE