More Stories from the Twilight Zone

by Carol Serling

  On every street, he thought he glimpsed her. In movie theaters, he was sure she was sitting a few rows ahead of him. In restaurants, he heard her laugh.

  “Who is she?” Claire asked one night.

  Paul didn’t answer. They were lying in bed, side by side, staring at the ceiling.

  “Do you want to sleep with her?” Claire asked.

  “I haven’t,” Paul said.

  “But do you want to?” Claire demanded.

  Paul’s silence was her answer.

  “I could have handled anything,” Claire said. “If you lost your job. Cancer. But not this. I have no way to fight this.”

  “I ended it,” Paul said. “Weeks ago.”

  “Whoever she is,” Claire said, “you might as well go to her. You’re not here anymore.” Claire whipped back the sheets and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “This isn’t any kind of life,” she said.

  Shrugging on her bathrobe, she said, “Go to her, get her out of your system, and come back. Or, if she’s what you want, I’ll give you a divorce.”

  2

  “It’s perfect,” Paul told Laurie, after his first month with Lily.

  “Just like you imagined?” Laurie asked, not sure whether she was being sarcastic.

  “What we’re like together,” Paul said, “it’s something I never could have imagined.”

  Laurie wanted to believe a relationship could be that good, but experience told her Paul must be living in a hopeful fantasy.

  “In the morning,” Paul said, “when I open my eyes, she’s there, standing by the bed with my coffee. Yesterday, on the way to lunch, we saw someone so intent on his BlackBerry, he went around a revolving door twice before getting out of a building. We share—”

  “The pleasure of seeing other people act foolishly?” Laurie said.

  “—a sense of the absurd,” Paul said. “Laurie, you’re too cynical.”

  “How’s the sex?” Laurie asked.

  “Telepathic,” Paul said. “Otherworldly.”

  Paul had moved into Lily’s apartment. Intimate, cluttered, fragrant. Lily had collected artifacts from her travels around the world. A jade figurine Lily had found in China was worth, according to one of Paul’s friends who came to dinner, at least $100,000.

  Paul found everything about Lily intriguing, exciting, surprising, new. She was the woman who would—in Goethe’s phrase—“kiss him and make him eternal.”

  But every gift has its price. And every paradise has its serpent.

  At work, the price was a “wonderful opportunity” offered by Paul’s father-in-law, Ben. The head of the firm’s Hong Kong office was being rotated back to New York. Paul could move the family to Hong Kong, do his two years there, and come back to the home office a full partner.

  In Ben’s mind, this was a win-win. Either Paul took the gig and broke it off with Lily. Or he turned it down—leaving Ben no choice but to fire him.

  Paul turned down the offer—and cleared out his desk.

  He saw the kids every Tuesday and every other weekend.

  Kelly was sarcastic to Lily.

  Jason was silent, sitting on one of the beds in Lily’s guest room, cross-legged, plugged into his iPod.

  Meals were a strain. If Lily cooked, Jason picked at the food, and Kelly claimed it made her sick.

  If they went out to eat, the kids could never agree on a restaurant.

  “You’re not being fair to Lily,” Paul told his kids one evening, sitting on the edge of Jason’s bed.

  Kelly lay on her bed, facing the wall. Jason sat next to Paul, cross-legged as usual, listening to his iPod.

  Kelly sat up. Violently.

  “I don’t want you to tell me everything’s going to be all right,” she said. “I want you to make everything all right.”

  “Why can’t you just come home?” Jason asked, still plugged into his iPod.

  “They’ll get used to me,” Lily told Paul later that night.

  By the end of the second month together, Paul began to notice . . . odd responses to his questions about Lily’s past. She wasn’t evasive, but the answers didn’t add up.

  She grew up outside of Boston in Newton, she told Paul once. But another time, she mentioned how much she loved the St. Patrick’s Day parades she used to go to in Savannah, Georgia.

  When Paul asked her about the apparent contradiction, she waved it away with a not unreasonable explanation. Part of her childhood was spent in Newton, part in Savannah.

  One time, she said her father was in the aerospace industry. Another time, she said he was in the military.

  “He worked in aerospace for the military,” Lily reasonably explained.

  But the after-the-fact explanations seemed improvised to Paul. When he tried to dig deeper, Lily would kiss him and distract him with sex.

  “What do you think she’s hiding?” Laurie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. “But I don’t really know that much about her.”

  “Except what she tells you,” Laurie said. “It sounds like you don’t trust her.”

  “I trust her,” Paul said. “Enough.”

  But he began waking up in the middle of the night, panicking. Who was she? What did he really know about her? What if she were a crook—or a con artist?

  “Why would you think that?” Laurie asked when Paul admitted his night fears.

  “Everyone she knows in New York is a new friend,” Paul said. “She appeared in town just a few months before we met.”

  “You love her?” Laurie asked.

  “Of course,” Paul said.

  “You’re feeling guilty about leaving Claire and the kids,” Laurie said, “and projecting your guilt onto Lily.”

  For another month, Paul tried to ignore his suspicions.

  But by spring, he began contacting the high school Lily claimed to have attended, looking up her homes in old telephone directories, checking the businesses where she claimed her father had worked.

  The high school explained they had no record of Lily; the files for the years Lily said she attended had been destroyed in a fire. Other people seemed to have lived in the houses in which she’d told Paul she’d grown up. Her father’s work record was unconfirmed—Lily explained it was because he was working on top-secret projects.

  The fire in the high school—well, that had nothing to do with her. The houses in which she said she’d grown up—what could she say? She grew up in those houses—which she described in detail.

  When Paul visited one of the houses and, using a phony excuse—saying he had grown up there—got inside, the interior checked out with Lily’s description.

  “What about the auction gallery you said you worked at in Boston?” Paul asked. “It has no record of your employment.”

  “Of course not,” Lily said. “I was a temp, paid under the table—at the employer’s request, so he could avoid paying FICA and benefits.”

  The address in Boston, where she claimed to have lived, was an empty lot. She’d lost her lease and decided to move to New York when the apartment building she lived in was torn down.

  The hospital where she said she was born had no record of her birth.

  “Why should it?” Lily said. When the hospital where she was born merged with another hospital, the records were lost—something that made it hard for her to get her passport years later.

  She was vague about the extent of her travel—six years of circling the world: Hong Kong, Calcutta, Rome, Oslo . . .

  When she grew up in Newton, she said, it was so provincial she had determined to see the world when she grew up.

  “What’s so suspicious about that?” she asked Paul. But Paul couldn’t figure out where she got the money for so many trips, and trips of such long duration.

  Although Lily always had a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy between what she told him and what he found out, Paul got more and more uncomfortable.

  When Paul met with his lawyer to discuss the divorce settlement, L
ily was oddly combative, insisting that he not allow Claire to take advantage of the situation. Even after the divorce, Paul still would have plenty of money. But Lily seemed a little too concerned about protecting that money.

  Lily explained, if no one was looking out for Paul, his guilt might cause him to give it all away.

  “What do you think?” Lily demanded. “I broke up your marriage so I could get your money—you think that’s what we’re about? This is what I think about money!”

  She grabbed the valuable jade figurine and threw it against the wall, shattering it.

  Paul put his arms around her to comfort her. Comfort ignited passion, and they made love wildly into the night.

  But the next morning, Lily was still upset.

  “I can’t believe you’ve been checking me out,” Lily said. “I’ll bet if I started checking out your past I’d find as many discrepancies.”

  “You’re going to blow it,” Laurie told Paul.

  “During the day, I don’t have any problems,” Paul said, “but when I wake up in the middle of the night, and look at her, sleeping next to me, as still as a corpse, I get this weird feeling . . . For all I know, Lily could be a psychopath. A serial killer.”

  If only Paul could have regained his trust—made a leap of faith, believed in the love he and Lily had shared when they first met—he could have saved himself from his growing obsession. An obsession that was beginning to affect both his physical and mental health.

  Laurie was becoming concerned. Paul was slowly going to pieces.

  He started to shadow Lily, listen in on phone calls, spy on her.

  One night, when she found Paul following her, Lily lashed out at him.

  “Without trust,” she said, “there can be no love. You’re destroying something that could be, should be only good, something you sacrificed your marriage, your work, everything to win.”

  But Paul couldn’t help himself. He was, by now, in the grip of what seemed to be madness.

  “Get your mind off it,” Laurie said. “Take her away for a weekend.”

  3

  Lily rented a house on Cape Cod for a week.

  “It’s on this bluff overlooking the ocean,” Lily said, excitedly showing Paul photographs the rental agent had e-mailed her.

  The drive up to the Cape was pleasant. The weather was overcast and the forecast was storms, but they didn’t let that bother them. They sang along with an oldies rock station. Stopped for a leisurely lunch and dinner. Played word games like Ghost.

  After dark, they arrived at the house, which was stark, silhouetted against the gathering clouds in the sky.

  Lily called Paul to dinner. He came into the room as she was lighting a thick, squat candle.

  A chill crept up Paul’s spine—not the erotic charge he used to get in Lily’s presence, but something clammy. Uncanny.

  “What’s that?” Paul asked.

  “A candle,” Lily said.

  “A Santeria candle,” Paul said. “A voodoo candle.”

  Lily shrugged.

  “I was in a hurry shopping,” she explained. “I stopped into the bodega on the corner . . .”

  The air was heavy. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  All through dinner, Paul studied Lily. Before this trip, he’d been afraid Lily might be after his money. Or his life.

  Now, maybe because of the isolation, maybe because of the thunder and occasional flash of lightning, he began to have a creepy feeling she was after something more valuable.

  His soul.

  When he saw her in the bathroom plucking hairs from his brush, he confronted her.

  “I want them for a locket,” Lily said.

  Paul grabbed for the strands of his hair.

  Lily dodged him and ran out of the bathroom.

  “What do you think I’m going to do with your hair?” Lily asked. “Use it to cast some hex?”

  Clutching the hair in her hand, Lily ran out of the bedroom, out of the house.

  Thunder cracked right above them.

  “You’re being crazy,” Lily said.

  Paul backed her up to the edge of the bluff.

  “You’re the spider,” Paul shouted over the storm. “I’m the fly. You trapped me at the party to eat my soul at your leisure.”

  Behind Lily, lightning split the sky.

  Paul reached for the strands of his hair—as Lily, pulling back her arm, lost her footing and fell sixty feet to the rocks below.

  Despite his lawyer’s attempt to get Paul off with a defense that Paul was temporarily insane, Paul was convicted of manslaughter-1, a class B felony.

  “You might not have to serve the full twenty-five-year sentence,” Paul’s lawyer told him.

  When Laurie visited Paul in prison, she looked at Paul with pity and contempt.

  “You schmuck,” she said. “You had twice what most people never get once. Real love. You had heaven and turned it into hell.”

  A month later, at a Seattle cocktail party, Robert Duhamil—a man like Paul, with a perfect marriage, perfect kids, a perfect job, a perfect life—went to get his wife a drink.

  When he looked across the room and saw Lily, he knew he had found his soul mate from the tingling that slithered up his spine like a snake.

  A man alone in a cell, pondering on the heaven he has lost and the hell that remains. He believed too much in love, and love is not what it seems . . . in the Twilight Zone.

  SALES OF A

  DEATHMAN

  David Gerrold

  Meet Justin Moody, a young man in search of a career—not just a job but a way to contribute to the people of his community. Not surprisingly, he’s going to accept a much greater responsibility than he has ever imagined, because the employment office is in the Twilight Zone.

  Whatever else people say about this job, it’s a necessary part of society. It’s work that needs to be done.”

  Justin scratched his head, rubbed his nose, and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Yes, I know all that. I mean, the job counselor explained it. More than once. She said I had an aptitude. That’s why she sent me here. She said I was good with people. People trust me. People like me. At least, that’s what she said.”

  “Yes, that’s all here in your file.” The woman behind the desk had an oddly dispassionate way of speaking. Soft-looking, quiet and managerial, she glanced through the file, turning pages slowly. “Actually, she said that you present yourself as unintrusive and nonthreatening. That’s what makes you perfect for this job.”

  Justin nodded politely. “I suppose that’s supposed to be a compliment.”

  “It is. You have no idea how many people come to us with the wrong idea about what we do here. Or simply the wrong attitude. People motivated by fear, anger, jealousy, revenge, or even the vain hope that this is a way to cheat the system. It isn’t. It’s about service. We provide a service necessary to the maintenance of our technological society.”

  “Yes, that’s what the orientation video said.”

  She closed the file. “What we’re looking for are people who can submerge themselves so completely in the job that they disappear. All that’s left is the service. Maybe you’re up to it, maybe you aren’t. There’s only one way to find out. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Are you trying to talk me out of it?”

  “Let me be candid,” she said. “The job does take an emotional toll. It requires a level of inner stamina that most of our applicants are incapable of maintaining for very long. That’s why we have a probation period. That’s true of any job, of course, but here your probation period is indefinite.”

  Justin took a deep breath. “I live with my dad. He’s not the easiest person in the world to live with, but he needs me. So I take care of him. I’ve done it for eleven years now. I had to quit school, but he’s my dad. I think that proves something. I mean, about my ability to be strong inside.”

  She nodded without expression. “Yes, we’ll see. Do you have any other questions?”
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  Justin started to shake his head, then stopped. “Um. How are the health benefits?”

  The old man sat alone in his wheelchair, staring out the window, staring down at the street below, the torn awning of the secondhand shop, the sign-plastered window of the liquor store, the groaning bus that farted black smoke as it rumbled past. The same view every day, the same people, hurrying, hunched over, caught in the desperate struggle to keep up with their own lives. The old man grunted and pushed his wheelchair backward away from the window.

  In the corner, a television set babbled soundlessly. Eleven minutes of shallow people pretending to be concerned, then four minutes of even shallower people explaining all the different ways a person could smell bad. Lather, rinse, repeat four times an hour. “Pfeh.” He turned away from it, facing the front door instead.

  At last, he heard the sound of a key in the upper deadbolt, the second deadbolt, and finally the bottom one. Justin pushed his way in, carrying two grocery bags. “I bought a chicken for dinner, Dad. Roast chicken, just the way you like it. To celebrate.”

  “You’re late. I need to pee. You want me to piss my pants again?”

  “It’s only five.” Justin put the bags on the kitchen table and came back to his father. He bent and kissed the old man’s forehead, then went around to the back of the chair to push him to the bathroom. “Come on, let’s get you taken care of, and then I’ll start dinner. I bought a roast chicken at the market. Your favorite. To celebrate.”

  “I’m not in the mood for chicken. Chicken is Sunday. Why were you late? Why didn’t you call? Help me onto the toilet.”

  “I went for a job interview. And that’s why we’re having chicken.”

  “You got a job? You can’t get a job. Who’s going to take care of me?”

  “I’ll still be here. It’s a service job. I can set my own hours. And I haven’t accepted yet.”

  “What kind of a job is it?”

  “It’s a very good one. It’s for the Department of Enabled Actuarial Transitional Health. I could make enough money I could even hire a part-time nurse for you, if you want.”