Night Gallery 2

by Rod Serling

  Suggs was in their midst, looking left and right—nodding, smiling, his rat eyes blinking, shining, and moving from one to the other. "Did you expect different?" Suggs asked. "It's what I've told you a thousand times about Lindemann. He's got no heart. He's built out of iron, timber, and ship's tar—"

  Nichols' voice from the door, though quiet, cut off the other voices and made all eyes turn to him. "But with sufficient heart, Master Suggs," Nichols said as he moved into the room, "to call me out in the middle of the night to help that creature."

  Suggs's lips twisted. "For what purpose, Doctor? To keep it alive so he can torment it?"

  There were several nods and more than one whispered assent.

  "To keep it alive," Nichols said, "because he's a lonely man."

  "That lonely, Doctor?" Bennett asked from behind the bar.

  "As lonely as is possible," Nichols responded, "for a human being to be."

  Bennett looked around the faces. "But," he began hesitantly, "it's a creature. It's not human."

  Old Bernacki crossed himself and nodded.

  "Whatever it is," Nichols said, "it won't survive too many more hours."

  First Mate Granger, deep in his cups and brave with rum, slammed one fist into a palm. "We could go over there—all of us—a boarding party. Tie up the damned thing and take her up to Boston and sell her while she's still alive."

  He looked around hopefully, as if expecting a reaction. There was silence. The men were still looking toward Nichols.

  "You do that," the doctor said very quietly. "Pick up pikestaffs and rifles, if need be. But best draw lots as to the first half-dozen men to start down the ladder. They'll be dead before they reach the hold." He looked from face to face. "Understand? Captain Lindemann, in the manner of solitary, friendless men, has found something to care about. Reptile, apparition, a specter from the seaweed—whatever it is—it's given him something to love."

  He made a motion to Bennett, who poured a tankard full of rum and handed it over to him. Nichols slowly sipped at it, savoring its biting heat, and thinking to himself of the bleakness of Lindemann's voice and the hollow desolation on his face as he stood in the dank dungeon of the ketch trying to hold back death with a lantern and a gnarled fist and his own unused, untried heart. Nichols shook his head and drained the rum from the tankard. The Lord did, indeed, work in mysterious ways; to pluck an object of love for Hendrick Lindemann out of the wet and endless cemetery that he had despised, hated, and feared all of his life.

  Like an undersized scarecrow, Suggs stood on the wharf, a ragged pea jacket billowing away from his gaunt body, and felt the razor-sharp wind come off the water to slice against him. He lifted up his face, listening intently at the sound of footsteps on the deck of Lindemann's ketch. Then he peered through the darkness and saw the big outline of the captain's body leaving the cabin. He heard the footsteps move over to the gunwales, and then the sound of a bucket hitting the water.

  Reluctant and yet intense, Suggs forced himself to move down the length of wharf toward the ketch. "Cap'n Lindemann," he called out.

  He saw the big figure bolt upright, still clutching to the bucket rope and trying to carve identity out of the darkness.

  "Who is it?" Lindemann asked.

  "It's Suggs, Cap'n. But that bucket of water you're filling—that won't do it."

  "What will, Suggs?" Lindemann asked. "Tea leaves?"

  Suggs moved over to the wharf end of the gangplank. "The trawler that almost ran you down, Cap'n . . ."

  "What about it?" Lindemann asked.

  "She went aground off Carney's Cape. Just as I said she would. Eleven hands lost."

  Lindemann lifted the water-filled bucket up to the deck. "That must have pleased you, Mr. Suggs."

  Suggs put one foot on the gangplank. "Not a bit, Cap'n. I may cry doom, but I don't take pleasure from it."

  Lindemann looked at the hunched-over dwarf figure. "What do you take pleasure from, Mr. Suggs?"

  "From helping," Suggs said softly. "You can believe that, Cap'n. I take pleasure from offering up a hand when I can."

  Suggs could almost see Lindemann's face freezing in the darkness.

  "Put that hand in your pocket," the captain said. "I'd sooner take my lunch in a bilge bucket."

  "You don't understand, Cap'n," Suggs said. "I've come to help you. As only I can."

  Suggs heard Lindemann's footsteps moving over to the cabin door.

  "Help yourself, Mr. Suggs. By putting distance between yourself and me. Or have you lost track of how many times I've put you on your back and how many of your teeth I've loosened?"

  "All forgotten, Cap'n," Suggs said, his face contorted into a gargoyle smile. Then, from inside his moth-eaten, ragged shirt he produced a bottle. "Cap'n," he whispered, as if sharing the most important secret on earth, "I told you I had potions. Powerful nostrums with miraculous properties."

  Lindemann lowered the bucket to the deck, then moved over to the gangplank. The one ship's lantern hung from a stanchion and threw out a weak, pale ray of light to illuminate Suggs. Lindemann looked from the bottle into the other man's face.

  "To burn my insides, no doubt, Mr. Suggs."

  Suggs shook his head. "To change a half-woman into a whole woman."

  Suggs could hear Lindemann catch his breath. "Watch your talk, Suggs . . ."

  "I mean it, Cap'n. The contents of this bottle poured into the mouth of that creature you have below—and by dawn she'll walk on two legs."

  Suggs felt an impulse to run when he saw Lindemann step onto the gangplank and walk its length toward him, the figure vast, bulky, and imposing; but he forced himself to stand his ground, and allowed Lindemann to reach out and take the small bottle from his hand, studying it.

  "Two bells now, Cap'n," Suggs said, almost breathlessly. "And by seven bells, the miracle will have occurred."

  The bottle was almost obliterated by Lindemann's giant hand. "I'm a desperate man, Mr. Suggs," he said softly. "They call my desperation insanity; I know that. But it's sufficient to tear you to pieces if this is your idea of a joke."

  "Cap'n . . ." Suggs sensed his advantage, the only advantage he could have over any man—to find another being more desperate than he, more frightened than he. "It's a scrawny, brandy-soaked carcass I carry around with me, but it's all I've got, and I value it. Would I come here in the dead of night so you could break me in half?" He pointed to the bottle. "Have her drink it. Then leave her alone. And in five hours, give or take a few minutes—you'll see the change."

  It was then that he noticed Lindemann's hand shaking as he held out the bottle.

  "If it's as you say," Lindemann said in a strained voice, "if it's as you say"—he looked up—"I'll bless you, Suggs, and I'll not forget it."

  Suggs studied the big man, noting the strange, strained quality in the voice and the look on his face.

  "She means something to you."

  Lindemann nodded. "She means life itself." He turned and moved back across the gangplank onto the ketch.

  "She'll have life itself, Cap'n." Suggs's voice followed him. "A gift from me to you. With my compliments."

  Then he turned and shuffled back into the darkness, disappearing at the far end of the wharf. He felt his feet touch the cobblestone, the coldness reaching through the thin leather to move up his skinny legs. The cold. Always the cold. But as he moved down the street toward the inn, he felt one elusive spot of warmth. The hate. The burning, flaming, all-consuming fire of hate for Hendrick Lindemann. For the slaps across his face, for the bloody mouths, for the stinking contents of spittoons splashed across his face, for the multiple hours of animal humiliation—God in heaven, what a debt had been incurred! And God in heaven, how it would be repaid that night!

  Captain Lindemann sat alone in his cabin, staring at the empty bottle on the small table in front of him. The creature below had gulped it down thirstily. Liquid. Any liquid. She was like some desert flower, baked by the sun, disintegrating from dryness. No matter how m
uch water he poured over her, no matter how many glasses he placed to her mouth, she seemed to wither and dehydrate in front of his eyes. And those eyes. Those pained, aching eyes. How they stared at him and beseeched him; how they pleaded with him and begged him; how they spoke in her soundless language and asked for release. But the eyes had captured Lindemann. The face had captured him. The soft blond hair. The white skin. He was as much a prisoner as the gasping, threshing thing down below in the hold.

  For Hendrick Lindemann had never known love. He had never known a possession that came with passion. And the thought of the creature (he thought of her as "woman") escaping him—this was simply beyond bearing. It was as Dr. Nichols had perceived. Something had breached his loneliness; something had crossed over the frontiers of his self-imposed exile from other humans, and to the extent that he could feel passion, he felt it for that captive being whose metamorphosis from freak to woman he now waited for.

  He pulled out his pocket watch for perhaps the twentieth time during the course of the night, and noted the gray, filtered light of dawn illuminating the face of it. Five hours had elapsed since administering Suggs's potion. He rose on unsteady legs, feeling a debilitating weakness that incredibly came with the surge of excitement. He moved over to the door leading to the ladder and opened it, then slowly descended toward the hold.

  The same dawn light came through the grating on the deck above the hold and revealed the figure of the woman, now standing. It took a moment for Lindemann to assimilate what he saw, and sort out from both what he had feared and what he had hoped for. But gradually the realization came that the creature had legs—long, perfectly formed woman's legs. And then he realized that her back was to him and that her long blond hair partially covered her naked back. Her hands were at her sides, and she seemed no longer to be struggling. And as the component fragments took form and moved into place, Lindemann realized that the body was beautiful—beautiful beyond anything he could describe. He felt his throat constrict and knew that he was crying.

  "You're a woman now," he managed to blurt out. "Understand? Magic or miracle or whatever—you're a woman now!" He shouted it out again, "You're a woman now!" as he started back up the ladder. "Suggs," he screamed as he ran through his cabin and out onto the deck. "Suggs, it worked. It's happened. You turned her into a woman."

  Beyond the gangplank on the wharf were the members of his crew and some of the people from the village.

  "She's no creature," Lindemann shouted at them. "She's no reptile. She's a woman!"

  The sailors stared at him.

  "You don't believe me?" Lindemann's voice carried over the early-morning silence. "Well, I'll tell you what, gentlemen. I'll walk her out onto the deck. That's what I'll do. I'll walk her out here so you can see her!"

  He turned and moved back over to the grating covering the hold, then yanked it open as if it were a layer of tissue paper. "Come up! Come up the ladder and show them!" He turned toward the wharf. "She'll not lie gasping below in that filthy hold anymore! She'll live with me at my side from now on!"

  He heard the creak of the ladder behind him, and he felt the tears running down his face. But it didn't matter. Let the bastards gape at him. Let them see him cry like a baby. Let them for the first time in their lives—and his—witness the birth of joy! But look at them stare! Look at their mouths drop open! Look at their eyes pop!

  "You've not seen Lindemann cry before, have you, you mother's sons," Lindemann roared out at them. "Well, I'll show you my tears without shame, lads. Without any shame at all. And you can gape and pop and swallow your tongues, and

  you'll get no apologies from me! I have a woman now! I have the most beautiful woman on earth, who will stay by my side now until . . ."

  It was then that Lindemann realized they weren't looking at him at all. They were looking past him to the hatch cover, and there was no admiration on their faces, no sudden contemplation of beauty, not even a touch of the lustful awe that men show for the unclothed woman thrust in front of them.

  Lindemann turned.

  He saw her only briefly as she swept by him, racing toward the bow of the ketch. Briefly. Just a flash of her as their eyes met. Then she had flung herself off the bow and into the sea. Her eyes.

  Unblinking, cold fish eyes popping out of the scaled fish face—the overlapping rows of fins. The pulsating slits on either side of her green throat that struggled for air. The puckered fish mouth that rounded out the horror that sat atop the beautiful white neck and the shapely white shoulders.

  But Lindemann's scream was not one of horror. The men on the wharf could perceive words to it even as he ran from them toward the bow. "No," he was screaming, "no, please. Wait."

  He was still screaming the words as he threw himself over the rail and into the water. "Wait . . . please . . . come back . . . please . . ."

  And then there was silence. Far off in the distance the men could see a small ripple of movement and just a flash of one white arm breaking the surface, then disappearing, followed by a thin white wake. But in the spot that Lindemann had disappeared, there was nothing to be seen. The sea had enclosed him. It had swallowed him. It had taken body and voice into its confines as completely and permanently as only the sea can do.

  In a fog-cloaked twilight the people of the village stood alongside the wharf and looked toward Dr. Nichols, who had just thrown a wreath into the now quiet sea. It floated serenely away from the shore, small, pitiful-looking early-spring blossoms that bobbed in and out of sight and finally disappeared.

  Nichols' voice was very soft as he opened the book in his hands and read from it. " 'We have fed our sea for a thousand years and she calls us, still unfed, though there is never a wave of all her waves . . . but marks our dead.' " 1

  He closed the book and stood there.

  It was Suggs who broke the spell and the silence by shifting around and clearing his throat.

  Nichols looked at him. "Master Suggs? Anything to add?"

  Suggs smiled, the cadaverous, rodent little face shining. "This needn't be your lot, Doctor," he said. Then he took Nichols' elbow. "What about a palm reading, Doctor? Or let me look at the tea leaves for you."

  Nichols shook off the touch and started to walk down the cobblestoned street. Suggs paddled after him.

  "Or a potion perhaps, Doctor . . . I've got a treasury of potions. A fair trove of delights not tasted by any man."

  Then his voice faded off with the sound of their footsteps. "Your fortune, Doctor. . . your fortune . . ."

  Suggestion

  I wouldn't have done what Harvey and the others had asked me to do, if they all hadn't hassled the hell out of me—the begging and pressuring and dressing up the Goddamned thing as if I were the only human being on the planet who could spice up a dull moment, or an insufferably dull man.

  Harvey Hemple wasn't really a bad guy—just an uncomfortable combination of much too much aggressiveness tacked on to what must have been a bleeding sense of inferiority. He was narrow-shouldered, big-nosed, jug-eared, and when he put on those Edwardlan clothes of his, he looked like the sort of store mannequin you might find in a department store that couldn't afford a professional window dresser.

  It began at Lucille Novotny's cocktail party. Lucille was on the broad-hipped side of thirty, with a flat chest, a thirty-seven-inch waist, and legs by Steinway; all you could think of was a pasty white tube of toothpaste squeezed at the top. She wrote copy at the agency where Hemple and I both worked, and she was a gushy, really unpalatable broad who had come from upstate New York direct from an across-the-tracks Polish community in a small town, obviously planning to spend the rest of her life trying to overcompensate for the humbleness of the beginning. She affected a clipped, precise British way of speech that was constantly intruded upon by unconscious and unbidden Slavic overtones. She littered her language with private-girl's-school bon mots like "barf" and "groovy" and "right on," which fitted her like panty hose fitted a squid. Her cocktail parties were protracted disaster
s that everybody showed up at because they didn't want to hurt her feelings. It was a bunch of incompatible people who had seen too much of each other at the office, forced to extend the particular day's association impressed into the social service of overstrong drinks and synthetic camaraderie. So we had stood around that night producing brittle, artificial laughter and equally brittle and artificial conversation. And it was Lucille herself, damn her, who, after seeing a third of the guests leave after about a half-hour, had fixed a witch's eye on me and brightly and loudly announced that I would now do my hypnosis act.

  Well, I do hypnosis, but strictly as a gag, and really not very competently at all. I can put people under, and occasionally can get a posthypnotic, and more than once I've accomplished regression or some kind of return to an earlier life. But, as I say, it was strictly a party gag, and then only when I was sufficiently bagged to throw over a natural reticence and shyness of my own.

  Lucille clapped her hands and banged on the bar and announced in that phony Joan Crawford voice of hers that Peter Connacher—me—would now entertain the assemblage with some mystifying mesmerizing. And who would be the first subject? The first volunteer? Well, of course, it was Harvey Hemple. He had been standing in the corner with a five-foot-nine-inch blond, already mesmerized by her cleavage. It was really almost masochistic the way Harvey always targeted in on the lady least likely to give him a tumble—figuratively, or mattress-wise. The blond was no exception. She did everything but yawn in his face, while he flitted around her like a suicidal moth, spewing out mispronounced French, trying to be witty and suave—miserably, humiliatingly conscious that he looked and sounded like an impotent poodle trying to make it with a St. Bernard. The saddest thing about the predictable and too often played scene was that Harvey was quite aware of the fact that he was striking out, and all that remained was to find a way to bow out gracefully and save as much of his pinched little face as he could.