Night Gallery 2

by Rod Serling

  At the sound of Lucille's announcement, he whirled away from the blond, held up his hand, and in his semifalsetto voice shouted out, "Me! I want to be the one hypnotized!"

  That undernourished chimp grin of his, built out of nerves and tension and insecurity, was plastered all over his face as he approached me in the center of the room, and his eyes darted left and right as he responded to the less than excited applause. He sat down on the sofa, facing me, loosening his big four-in-hand tie, and looking up at me expectantly.

  Bored drinkers crowded around, grateful for the distraction, grateful for any distraction.

  "Go ahead," Lucille Novotny urged me, hitting the vowels hard, like Lawrence Welk, and momentarily forgetting the fake, superimposed culture that propped up her language like jerry-built stilts.

  So what could I do? There was the piano-legged, fever-eyed hostess desperate to keep things moving; and there was poor Harvey Hemple seeking, if not immortality, at least a couple of minutes of hot fusing with the wallpaper and taking on a focalized identity of his own.

  I remembered thinking at the time that Harvey would make a perfectly lousy subject for hypnosis. He was too damned tense, too preoccupied with himself, too uptight.

  Oh, God, how wrong I was!

  I looked down into that eager, painfully homely little face, now shining with excitement and expectation, and I also remembered thinking that I'd give him about three minutes, and if he didn't respond by then, I'd call it a wash, apologize, and get the hell out. Harvey was the insult added to Lucille Novotny's injuries.

  "All right, Harv," I intoned. "Now, close your eyes and relax. That's right, just relax. Keep your eyes closed. You're getting very tired . . . very drowsy . . . very sleepy, Harv. You're falling asleep."

  His little calf eyes fluttered for a second or two and then closed.

  "Now, Harvey," I continued softly, "you're falling asleep. You're relaxing, and it's beautiful. Just beautiful, Harv. That drowsy feeling is just what you needed."

  There were a couple of snickers from the group, and they crowded around closer. This would, of course, be just great for Harvey—because he needed attention like most men needed eggs to go with their bacon. But I suddenly realized, looking down at him, that he was quite unaware of anyone else. He had responded to suggestion almost immediately. The eyes were, indeed, closed, and he wasn't feigning. Harvey was falling asleep. There was no flutter in the eyelids, and his body was totally relaxed. His breathing was slower but more regular. And, as fate would have it, this poor little bastard whose ambitions and thyroid left his talent behind at the starting gate, turned out to have one particular strength. He was the most suggestible subject of hypnosis I'd ever seen.

  "Harvey," I said, getting more interested, "raise your right arm, Harvey."

  He did so.

  "Now, try to lower it, Harvey."

  The arm started to lower.

  "Harvey," I interrupted, "You can't lower it anymore. It's chained to the ceiling. You simply can't lower it."

  A look of strain showed on his face, and then some perspiration. His arm shook as he gave it a good college try, with maximum effort—but it stayed suspended in mid-air.

  At this point Lucille's cocktailers were hooked. Hypnosis, in the social situations, is a kind of freak show. It's a promise of watching an acquaintance make an ass out of himself or at least do things he wouldn't ordinarily do. I had no intention of embarrassing Harvey, because his whole bloody life was an embarrassment. I thought I'd just run him through some fundamental paces, then snap him out of it and forget it.

  "Now, open your eyes, Harvey," I ordered. "I want you to clasp your hands like this." I put my hands together in front of him, fingers interlocked. "Now, look at my eyes, Harv. Clasp your hands tight."

  I reached over and took hold of his hands, pulling them forward until they were extended; then I squeezed his fingers together. "Make them real tight, Harv. As tight as you can. That's it. Tight—real tight. Now, your fingers are all locked together."

  I saw his hands quiver as their grip on each other became more solid.

  "That's it, Harvey," I said. "Tighter and tighter now. Your fingers are sticking together more and more. They're becoming more and more tightly clasped. They're sticking together. They're getting really stuck. They're locked, Harv. Your hands are stuck fast. You can't take them apart. Now, in a minute I'm going to tell you to pull them apart, but you won't be able to. You can't pull your hands apart. Try, Harv, Try—but you won't be able to."

  There was no fear in Harvey's now open eyes, but there was strain and tension as he tried to pry his fingers apart. He pulled and yanked until the veins bulged out on his temples and his eyes looked glassy.

  "That's all right, Harvey," I said. "You can take them apart now."

  Slowly his hands and fingers seemed to relax and fell to his sides. The depth of his trance state was phenomenal.

  For the next few minutes, after awakening him, I had him stiffen, kneel, crawl, search for gold, sing a song, and then let him go back to sleep.

  The fascinated idiots standing around us had a couple of dozen suggestions as to intriguing exercises—most of them immoral. Normally—or at least, so it is said—a subject under hypnosis will perform no act that his normal nature would rebel at. But in Harvey's case, I wasn't so sure. He seemed so completely susceptible to command that there was really no assurance that if I'd ordered him out the window, three stories down to the street, he wouldn't comply.

  Just why I came up with the next bit, I'll never really know. But I happened to see the half-filled highball glass in Lucille's hand. I wasn't thinking, really. It just came to me that with anyone as suggestible as Harvey, you could practically go the route. You could put him off on some misty limbo of the subconscious, and only guess at just how completely he'd accept the fantasy.

  I held up Lucille's glass, and I said to Harvey, "Harv—open your eyes, please."

  His eyes opened, staring at me.

  I pointed to the glass. "This is a mug of boiling hot, scalding water."

  Harvey's eyes looked bland and neutral.

  "Harvey," I ordered, "put your fingers in this mug. And remember—it's scalding hot."

  Harvey reached across with his right hand, stuck two fingers in the ice-filled glass, let out a little gasp of pain, then quickly pulled them out.

  I don't give a damn if no one believes this. I really don't. But I swear to God, I saw it. Harvey's fingers were covered with thick, white blisters stretching from nails to knuckle joints.

  Lucille's guests loved it. They loved it like kids love a horror show—part an overwhelming fascination, and part an ice-cold chill of apprehension. Something was going on that they couldn't fathom. But what should have stopped me there—but didn't—was the fact that I didn't understand it either. Here was the mind taking over completely the functions of the body. Brain cells were telling the flesh, a body length away, that boiling-hot liquid had attacked skin; and skin, in turn, had to react.

  I don't think anyone in the room quite understood the implications of what had happened. Just as I don't suppose the ticket buyers to a freak show really ever give a thought to the psychology of the tattooed man or what it is that motivates him to cover up his humanity with red and blue ink and sentence himself to the status of freak for the rest of his life.

  I should have realized then that I had left the road with the signposts and was stumbling off into a wilderness beyond that was one-half quicksand and the other a mine field.

  What I'd intended to do at that point was simply to run through a few more pretty fundamental demonstrations—having the subject rise, then feel that he was falling, or else follow me and then make him believe he was forced to walk backward—just a few relatively simple suggestions that are interesting to watch and kind of fun, but which carry with them no particular risk. This is what I'd planned to do. But Lucille and her drinking buddies would have no part of it.

  Some miniskirted broad from the accountin
g office started to make noises that we should make Harvey think he's Mark Antony entering the boudoir of Cleopatra. And Lucille, with much heavy breathing, concurred that this would be a kick.

  Another account exec started to ootz me to plant a suggestion—that I should wake Harvey up, but give him a posthypnotic that whenever somebody clapped his hands, Harvey would imagine himself a big stallion and the first girl he met would be a filly in heat.

  All of them—every damned one of them—with flushed face, alcohol-bright eyes, and a bottom-line insensitive cruelty, had some other small item of clinical advice as to how we could turn Harvey into a side show and do whatever raunchy, dirty little thing their own subconscious desperately wanted, but couldn't climb over the wall of convention to do themselves.

  And while they were shouting at me and giggling at me and panting out rotten little X-rated suggestions, I took a long look at Harvey. I saw him at that moment as I'd never seen him before. He wasn't just Harvey the klutz, the self-deluded Lothario, the sad little swinger who could find no one to swing with. He was just a guy. A discontented, unhappy, small man who held on to a deadly, dull life—the dirty end of the stick—destined to be nobody, do nothing, and live and die with no other distinction than a success at the art of losing.

  And while I was staring at his ugly little face in repose, the Lucille Novotny Marching, Chowder, and Stick-a-Needle-into-a-Buddy's-Back-and-Humiliate-the-Hell-Out-of-Him Club kept up a running barrage of suggestions on how to spice up an evening.

  "Make him take off his clothes."

  "Make him go to the bathroom."

  "Give him a posthypnotic that he's a monkey trying to open up a banana with his hand bandaged."

  "Make him do something exciting, Pete," Lucille Novotny ordered, exasperated and subconsciously battling convents, Catholocism, and thirty years of suppressing a marching parade of sexual fantasies that perched outside of her bedroom door, forbidden to come in, but oh, so desperately desired.

  It wasn't that I particularly liked Harvey Hemple. He was a drag, a bore, a self-deluded horse's ass, and a pain to be with. But he'd already paid his dues for his self-delusions. He'd paid for them with much too much loneliness—more than men should have to live with. So I thought at that moment I'd give him a break. I'd turn my back on this pack of lusting, would-be voyeurs, and I'd give Harvey a ticket to his own private and personal fantasy with a door locked to the outside. I'd let him hallucinate and have fun doing it, but provide no windows for the leering, cocktail peeping toms.

  I bent down over the sleeping figure, and I said softly, "Harvey—you're in a place . . . a special place . . . where you've always wanted to be. It's a nice place. A friendly place. A place you think about a lot."

  I saw some kind of movement behind the closed eyes, and there was just a barely perceptible nodding of the head.

  Lucille and her buddies started to complain that this act wasn't fair. They wanted something spectacular. They wanted something that came without clothes and with humiliation. But then they stopped their yapping, because very slowly both of Harvey's hands were raised, and the fingers clutched something in mid-air—something, of course, invisible.

  From deep in his throat came a sound. First it was as if he was just clearing his throat, and then the sound took on some kind of form. It Was the kind of loud hum that a kid uses when he's playing airplanes.

  And then it hit me, as it did a couple of others—that's precisely what Harvey was doing. He was flying an airplane. Soon he was banking and winging over, diving down toward the ground, then zooming upward, looping, and then shooting skyward, and all the time there came this deep-chest, low roar of the engine noise, manufactured in the pistons of his chest and in the factory of hallucinations that was his mind. And while we were watching, his eyes opened, and there was the look of eagles. There was the keen, probing expression of the trained pilot as he jetted across the sky.

  It figured, of course. A jet pilot. That would be Harvey Hemple's deep-rooted wish and layered-over dream, to be the one thing he could never be. He would never have the skill, the coolness, the nerve, the intelligence, or the physical makeup to fly an airplane. And because it was the totally unattainable item on the agenda of his destiny, it was the first thing he thought about in his subconscious. It was lyrical and poetic and romantic. Harvey Hemple, jet pilot! Harvey Hemple with the silver wings, the slouch cap, the earphones; Harvey Hemple, the conqueror of the far-out air.

  And while we all watched, Harvey Hemple flew his jet back and forth across a mystical sky, diving through clouds and then pulling back on the imaginary yoke to send his aircraft whistling upward into a deeper blue. Upward. Still upward.His enclosed fists rested against his stomach. The imaginary plane was sitting on its tail, absolutely vertical, and still climbing.

  And then, as we all watched, it happened.

  A sudden look of bewilderment clouded his eyes. Then confusion and doubt. And then fear. Fear that picked up Harvey Hemple in a giant, iron fist and squeezed him dry. For a moment he was sitting there on a couch, his back pressed tightly against a cushion, his face raised toward the ceiling, fists still clenched at his stomach, holding on to the make-believe controls of an aircraft. For just one additional moment, wild, frightened eyes scanned what must have been an altimeter, an air-speed indicator, and whatever other dials there were to register and document distance, time, fuel consumption, engine status, and all the other clues that tell a man how safely he's defying the laws of gravity. And then very slowly, while Harvey's hum turned into an inhuman thin wail of sound, his head bent forward, following the direction of his clenched fists. Then the trunk of his body also bent over, and it was like watching a perfect pantomime of a man in a cockpit of a plummeting aircraft.

  Down, down, down.

  He was falling.

  It was an illusion, a dream sequence. A pantomime of fantasy played out in an apartment house on a living-room sofa.

  But the reality was eerie and astounding.

  For on Harvey Hemple's face could now be seen the flesh-pulled distortion of negative G-forces; a horror mask of distended lips, popping eyes, bulging cheekbones, as the flesh was tightened to a breaking point by gravity's screaming protest.

  The ear-piercing whine of Harvey's voice simulating a jet's descent literally enveloped the room. And the drinkers, Lucille and those thrill-seeking cocktail-swigging animals, began to realize they were getting much too much thrill for their money and started to back away.

  Later . . . weeks later. . . months later . . . when in nightmares they would recall this scene, they'd be thankful they had backed away.

  There was Harvey's scream, and my own shouted commands for him to "wake up" and "stop falling"—commands which hypnosis rejects as pointless. You don't scream at a subject. You tell him he's able to do something—not that he's forced to. But by that point, while watching Harvey's face turn into something close to a Halloween hell, it was too late to try to move into his fantasy. He was beyond any external suggestion. The plane of his special and private world was unreachable from where I or anyone else stood.

  And then it happened.

  I felt something wet slash across my cheek. I heard screams from all around the room. And then I looked down at what had been Harvey Hemple.

  He was on the floor, crunched together like a kneeling Buddha his clothes smoldering. Smoke spiraled up from burned hair; blackened stumps stuck out from charred sleeves; his legs, smelling of burned flesh, stuck out at crazy and impossible angles.

  Harvey Hemple had crashed.

  He was the burned, blackened, crushed, battered victim of hitting earth at the speed of sound.

  There was an autopsy. There were hours and days and weeks of questioning by the police. There was a total, unbelieving rejection of everything said to the authorities by the guests at Lucille Novotny's cocktail party. And finally they put a tag on a manila folder that read: "Hempie, Harvey. Suicide. Self-immolation." Then they stuck the folder in a big file—the carded
graveyard where statistics take the place of corpses.

  And as for myself: I don't hypnotize anymore. I discreetly stay away from cocktail parties of any sort. I'm always afraid that at some given, dull moment, when the bourbon and martinis cease doing their job of palliating the unbearable dullness and despair of humans who can't hack it, somebody might look across the room at me and say, "We will now be entertained by some mystifying mesmerizing from Peter Connacher."

  Forget it.

  Peter Connacher has retired from the entertainment business.

  Peter Connacher no longer puts the ring of suggestion through the nose of some unwary subject.

  He doesn't, because quite obviously a subject can turn into a victim.

  Now I stay home a lot, and I do my drinking in solitary and very reflective privacy.

  That may not guarantee my longevity.

  But at least I'll retain the sanity I have left.