More Stories from the Twilight Zone

by Carol Serling

  “So you’re not afraid to do it if you have to, but you don’t want to—”

  “Just good business.”

  “But you’ll do it if you have to?”

  I gotta think about it. But considering what the consequences would be if I turned down the contract, not for very long.

  Not for very long? I already been thinking about it.

  In these damn dreams.

  I’m not having guilty dreams for what I never done yet, they’re like rehearsals for what I’m maybe gonna have to get done right if and when that’s the way the dice come up. I’m always about to get nailed or worse because of some detail or something gets screwed up, now ain’t I?

  “So I gotta get it right for once to make them stop!” I find myself proclaiming, like there’s a lightbulb over my head and I just found the Lost Chord.

  “The dreams?”

  “Yeah, of course, Doc, what else? I told you I never killed anybody yet, I’m not guilty of anything . . . well, anyway not no capital felony. They ain’t your blocked memories or cathartic enema, they’re not about my past, they’re dreams of my future—”

  “Your possible futures! Prescient dreams of a kind—there’s plenty of that in the literature, but not like this . . . they’re . . . they’re a set of alternate future scenarios!” He looks like he’s practically creaming in his pants for some reason.

  “Yeah, yeah, like my maybe futures, if I can’t avoid it. At least I gotta know I’ll get it right if it’s ever got to happen—”

  “And if you get it right in a dream—”

  “The dreams go away.”

  I’m practically creaming in my pants myself. “I got it, Doc. Hypnotize me again. But this time you give me one of those . . . what do you call it, hypnotic suggestions. To know I’m dreaming and not wake up until I know I’m home free, I can’t get nailed.”

  “Do I have your permission to—”

  “I just told you—”

  “—to try to communicate with you, can I try to make it interactive, can I write it up for publication? If this works, it could make me the next Oliver Sacks.”

  “What kinda sex? Whatever! Just do it!”

  I’m a cop.

  The worst kind of cop, a vice squad creep accustomed to screwin’ freebies from the same junkie skanks I run through the revolving door when their pimps forget to grease my paw with the weekly payoff, the vice equivalent of old-time beat cops grabbing apples off fruit stands.

  But I been going a mile too far, lots of miles in fact, taking whatever smack the hookers I been screwing are caught holding, selling it to those I encounter not holding and feeling the pain. Stealing the goods from the hookers the street dealers sold it to, and then using the very same heroin to steal their customers in the bargain.

  And lately I been shaking down pimps and street dealers directly, taking both goods and proceeds, whichever I find them holding, and even forcing them to buy back their own inventory from me at inflated wholesale prices.

  What are they gonna do, call the cops?

  The cops is us.

  I’m standing in an alley full of garbage cans and bum piss puddles over the corpse of a skuzzy pimp and sometime small-time smack dealer with a rap sheet long as an elephant’s trunk, got what was coming to him, lying here in his own blood with his pockets turned inside out and his throat cut in an unprofessional manner and the broken bottle lying there right upside his head.

  Standing beside me in a trench coat and a fedora with its brim pulled down over his face like Bogart as he eyeballs the scene with me is a homicide lieutenant.

  “You know this guy?” he asks me.

  Well, what can I say? Everybody on the vice squad knows who everyone else is running so I’m not gonna get away with denying that one.

  “Yeah. One of my snitches.”

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “Are you kidding? A penny-ante pimp well-known for dealing smack to his own five-dollar junkie whores doesn’t exactly lack for people like to see him dead or ready to cut his throat for the next fix if necessary, so we don’t lack for the usual suspects.”

  “But things aren’t always what we think they seem, now are they?” says the homicide dick, looking up at me.

  Damn strange thing for him to say. Strange-looking homicide lieutenant. Wire-rim hippie glasses, graying ponytail down behind his head. Don’t go at all with the Dick Tracy outfit.

  And I know this guy from somewhere else . . . don’t I? And he’s looking at me as if he knows things about me better than I know them myself.

  And somehow I know that I’m not going to get away with lying to this guy.

  But I know I gotta try anyway.

  Because I killed the scumbag.

  What was I supposed to do?

  My own goddamn snitch turns out to be an Internal Affairs undercover running a number on me! It’s enough to have Mahatma Gandhi reaching for his revolver! Okay, everyone knows there ain’t no honor among thieves, but looks like there ain’t even honor left among crooked cops. I mean, this son of a bitch’s cover’s long since made him one of the bad boys, Internal Affairs or not.

  He arranges a meet in this crummy alley we used, or one like it, to make sure we keep things private, tells me he’s got a tip for a juicy bust. He’s there when I arrive, dancing back and forth nervously like he always does, but he’s wearing wire-rim glasses, which he never has before, and the eyes behind them aren’t the usual weaselly jump and glitter, but cold and hard like greased steel ball bearings.

  And since I last seen him, which can’t be more than a couple weeks ago, he’s gone bald on top of his head to halfway back, and somehow managed to grow a long gray ponytail.

  “So?”

  “So I got a hot tip for you,” he says, giving me a look like a hungry cat about to sink his fangs into a canary. “A significant bust.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “You,” he says, whipping a little .38 snubnose out of his flasher raincoat pocket and pointing it one-handed at my gut in an unprofessional manner so’s he can whip out a badge and shove it into my face at the same time.

  “What the—”

  “You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  The rat’s reading me my Miranda, and I don’t have to look at his badge to know it’s Internal Affairs.

  “You think you’re gonna get away with popping me?” I snarl at him. “I got as much on you as you got on me, they put me on the stand and I’ll sing your song, and it’s gonna be ‘Melancholy Baby,’ you rat-fink bastard!”

  He gives me this smug little smile, the kind you want to punch out right away, and I know I gotta make some kinda move to take him out before he even says it.

  “Go ahead, asshole, rat out my cover. You really think what I’ve been doing on the side hasn’t been authorized by my captain?”

  Well, of course I’m not that stupid. I am screwed. I am looking at fifteen years’ minimum on the Rockefeller Law alone, and that’s the least of it. And vice cops in the joint have worse things to worry about than serving out a long stretch, like living long enough to do it.

  He shoves the badge back in his coat pocket, fishes out the plastic cuffs, motions with his pistol for me to hold out my hands. I hesitate.

  “Do it!” And he signals with his gun again.

  I give him a sad ya-got-me shrug, move in closer, slowly stretching out my arms to let him cuff me—

  —as I kick him with all my might square in the balls.

  He folds, hunching over, and reaching down two-handed without thinking like any guy would to cradle his yowling nuts—

  Dropping the gun in the process.

  I scoop it up, grab him by the ponytail, and yank him as upright as a slimeball like him can get, shove the pistol right in his face.

  “Now what, wiseguy?” I snarl.

  “Now what yourself, asshole?” he comes back at me. “You gonna shoot an Internal Affairs cover? Murder one, Joe. Murder one plus for kil
ling a cop.”

  He’s right, of course. I gotta think fast.

  Well, maybe not that fast, I’ve got the gun on him, and he ain’t going nowhere in the next thirty seconds, now is he?

  Cold and clear. Got time to get it right this time.

  I gotta off this rodent. I can’t let him out of this alley.

  But I gotta cover myself. I gotta be able to have it pinned on someone else.

  Hey, no problem! I realize.

  I can just pin it on more suspects than homicide can know what to do with and they’ll give up trying to sort ’em all out, not worth the effort, Captain; lots of scurve coulda offed this creep, junkies without the money for a fix, one of his hookers high as a kite. Right, it’s a wonder he lasted this long, we really give a crap . . . ?

  But it’s gotta look like it happened on the spur of a red-hot moment.

  I glance around sidewise. Nothing but garbage cans. Still holding the pistol on him, I slide over to the nearest one, flip off the cover, rummage around blind—

  “Hey, what are you—”

  My hand closes around the neck of some kind of bottle, I pull it out, smash the bottom of it against the wall as I roundhouse the rat with my gun hand across the temple. Using the pistol like brass knucks, he goes down like the sack of shit he is.

  I don’t bother checking to see if he’s out cold or not, who cares, I saw open his throat with the broken end of the bottle until the blood’s spurting out his jugular, not as easy to do as the movies make you think. Then I wipe the bottle off with a dirty pizza joint napkin from the garbage so the crud’ll mask any of my prints I mighta missed, and drop it by his head to make the murder weapon nice and obvious for Homicide, and empty his pockets of cash and smack to supply the motive.

  Slick as that, I got it right, and I’m home-free.

  “The guilty flee where dead men pursueth.”

  I’m staring back at the homicide detective lieutenant.

  Suddenly I’m freaking, suddenly I’m shaking. The same trench coat and fedora. The same glasses. The same damn ponytail. Why didn’t I see it before?

  I see it now.

  The homicide detective and the dead snitch have the same face.

  Worse, maybe it’s just the same mask. Because I somehow know there’s someone else behind it.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not guilty of anything!”

  It’s like I’m talking to that someone else somewhere else where he’s not a homicide cop and I’m not exactly lying.

  “But you haven’t gotten it all right yet, now have you? And you won’t be home-free until you do.”

  This dead man’s spook, this homicide creep, this nightmare witch doctor, knows.

  And he’s right.

  Whichever he is, he’s got the goods on me to nail me to the gurney with the needle. Like we’re playing out the script of some TV show, like in a dream, where you know what’s gonna happen but you know you can’t do anything about it, that it’s gonna rerun forever until you finally get it right.

  That he knows.

  But he doesn’t know that I know what I gotta do now.

  Or for some reason he doesn’t care. Like it is just a TV show he’s watching. Like it’s all a dream.

  Maybe it is. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because one more little detail to take care of and I can’t get nailed, and I’m home-free. I know it. And he seems to know it.

  And it’s not like he hasn’t been asking for it, now is it?

  I reach under my jacket for the shoulder holster I know is there, pull out my .44 Magnum, and blow him away—

  —and I wake up standing over the cheap desk with the shrink facedown on it with half his head blown off and the famous smoking gun somehow still in my hand. Hands are pounding on the door; sirens are howling outside for my ass like a wolf pack.

  What the hell happened?

  To make a long story short of insanity pleas, guilty verdict, appeals, more insanity pleas, that are still going on, I still don’t know, even after telling the whole truth to the jury and appeals court judges more times than I can remember . . . I mean, that should be enough to prove I was crazy sooner or later, shouldn’t it? It sure convinces me.

  Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Joe.

  But, hey, spend this much time in a solitary cell on death row, and you look to find a bright side.

  You could say I finally got it right after all.

  At least in the last dream.

  Yeah, that’s right, after I did, those nightmares never came back.

  When I made my bones good and proper, I blew them all away.

  Picture of a man who’s found his answer.

  Picture of a man who’s rid himself of his nightmares.

  Picture of a man likely to spend the rest of his life paying the price.

  Picture of a man who’s escaped from his bad dreams only to awake into a worse nightmare in what we call reality.

  Picture of a man who has learned that one way or the other, he’ll never escape from his jail cell solitarily confined in the Twilight Zone.

  THE LAST

  CHRISTMAS

  LETTER

  Kristine Kathryn

  Rusch

  A perfect Christmas for Joanne Carlton is giving her family, her grandchildren, and the grandchildren of her extended family a Christmas they will always remember in her home. The smell of cookies fills the air, decorations cover the walls, the tree perfectly in place, wrapped presents already under the heavy branches. And every Christmas card hung except for one. A very special card. An impossible Christmas card that could not exist, yet does, and made this a Christmas Joanne Carlton would always remember as well, for this was the year she received a Christmas card sent directly from the Twilight Zone.

  I can’t believe you did this, Joanne,” her sister said on the phone. “Just because I can’t come to Wisconsin for Christmas doesn’t give you the right. It’s mean.”

  Joanne Carlton leaned against the oven. It was warm with the afternoon’s baking. The entire kitchen smelled of vanilla, cinnamon, and cookies.

  “I didn’t do anything, Annie,” Joanne said tiredly.

  “Nice try,” her sister snapped and hung up.

  Joanne rested the phone against her forehead and closed her eyes. For nearly fifty years, she had put up with her sister’s histrionics, usually laughing them off. Annie was volatile. Annie was temperamental. Annie was the emotional one, while Ginny was the pretty one and Joanne was the smart one.

  Joanne was also the oldest and had been, from the beginning, the one everyone expected to be responsible.

  But she wasn’t responsible for this.

  She set the phone back in its cradle, then wiped her hands on the towel she had looped through her belt.

  The grandchildren were coming for the annual cookie decorating party, something everyone in her extended family—the family she raised, not the one she was raised in—looked forward to. Cookie decorating and then, in four days, Christmas.

  Her entire house was spotless. She had decorated every room, and had trees on every floor. In the basement she had set up the white flocked tree she had bought one year when the children were young, upstairs she had the artificial tree that her late husband had once sprayed with pine scent because he couldn’t stand the smell of plastic, and on this floor she had a real tree that her son Ryan had begrudgingly helped her put up in early December.

  Her house looked like Christmas, felt like Christmas, and smelled like Christmas, and that was what she wanted—a sense of the holiday so strong that years from now, when her grandchildren thought of Christmas, her house would rise in their memories as the perfect place for the perfect holiday.

  The children would have their perfect holiday, but for her, some years were harder than others. This was one of the hard years.

  She walked into the entry. Christmas cards hung from the garland that looped the mahogany banister leading upstairs. She picked up the pile of cards that had arrived this week
, the ones she hadn’t had time to hang.

  Strike that. The ones she’d been avoiding hanging.

  She plucked out a card that had ostensibly come from her father. It looked like a card Daddy would pick out: garish red and green, with Santa and Rudolph on the front. Santa was shaking his finger at Rudolph, whose nose was glowing red.

  We can’t call your room the Red Light District, Santa was saying, and no, I won’t explain why.

  Inside, the card read HAPPY HOLIDAYS, with the “I” dotted by the image of Rudolph’s red nose. Underneath was tight precise writing that said simply, I love you, Button. Merry Christmas. Daddy.

  The disturbing part of the card wasn’t the slightly risqué slogan or her father’s unblemished handwriting (despite his shaking fingers). It was the Christmas letter tucked inside.

  She had opened it the day the card arrived and started to read, then stopped with tears in her eyes. Obviously, Annie had gotten one of these letters too and it had upset her as much as it had upset Joanne. Soon, Joanne would probably be getting a call from Ginny, and while she wouldn’t be angry—not like Annie was—she would profess a mild shock and dismay over the way that Joanne “of all people” had handled the holiday.

  Even though Joanne had had nothing to do with the letter.

  She unfolded the piece of paper and leaned against the banister, the garland tickling her neck. The letter looked like every other Christmas letter Daddy had written in his long life.

  Joanne would have sworn that it had been typed on the Royal that his mother had given him (at great expense) when he went off to college in 1932. He had used that Royal throughout his life, having the keys repaired when they needed it, and stockpiling ribbons in the 1980s when the demise of the typewriter became apparent.

  The arch of the lower case “a” was broken, and the enclosed part of the lower case “e” was filled in because no matter how often he cleaned the keys, he could never get that “e” to work right again.

  He—or whoever had done this—hadn’t photocopied the letter, like Daddy did in his last two decades. Instead, the letter had obviously been mimeographed.