• • •
Five young men, soldiers all. Florida, New Jersey, Iowa, Ohio, and New York, with the usual backgrounds, all stuck in a situation beyond their making or understanding. There is no logic here, just a seemingly endless nightmare from which the only escape might be death. In the next second we’ll begin to see the situation for what it really is—the past, the present, and, more important to them, the future.
• • •
A mortar round struck ten yards to the left and slightly behind their position. Someone from the other side of the tall palm tree began returning fire, momentarily breaking The Corporal out of his reveries.
He cautiously raised up so that he could just see over the top of the boulders, but the Sarge was gone from behind the hill. Nowhere in sight, but then the machine-gun fire from the pillbox concentrated on their position again, and he ducked back down.
In his head he could see the five of them desperately trying to get away, but none of them knew to where or what they might find if they got there. At first they made a human pyramid, climbing on one another’s shoulders, but they couldn’t reach the top.
Of the boulders?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t see that far.
Another mortar round landed nearby, and The Corporal rose up again to look for the Sarge, but machine-gun fire from the pillbox forced him back.
To his imagination.
The five of them took off their web belts, linked them together, and attached a bayonet to one end. Like a grappling hook. One of the soldiers, The Corporal couldn’t see who—but maybe it was himself because his need to escape was even stronger than the others’—tossed the bayonet up over the top.
Three times before it finally caught on something and he climbed over the top of the boulder and tumbled down to the other side. Where he . . . ?
The Corporal opened his eyes again, confused in the first instant. He had escaped, in his mind, but he had no idea to where. He thought he might have seen snow; maybe he was lying facedown. And when he looked up he’d been seeing something, perhaps a person, but not a Japanese soldier, and not the Sarge.
Pechstein was looking at him, an odd expression on his red, freckled face smudged with grease and mud.
“What?” The Corporal asked.
“You fall asleep or something? You okay?”
It struck The Corporal that the mortar shells had stopped coming, and the machine gun in the pillbox had gone silent.
“What’s going on? What’s happening?”
“Beats the shit outta me,” Pechstein said. “Maybe the Sarge got lucky.”
The Corporal rose up and took a quick look at the low hill and to the right, at the pillbox, but there was no movement, no sound. It was as if the five of them had been dropped off the face of the earth, or at least out of the battlefield.
Then a mortar round dropped so close in front of them that one of the larger boulders was dislodged and came tumbling down, missing Horvak by less than one foot.
Then he had it, the place to which he had escaped by climbing up the boulders, and the figure. He was a doll, or something; the figure above him was that of a little girl, who picked him up and threw him back over the boulders. Into a barrel with other dolls being collected for Christmas.
• • •
Just a barrel where are kept make-believe figures made in the shape of human beings. Of soldiers unloved and in mortal danger for the moment. But somewhere just on the other side is a place of peace and home and love. If only they can get there, out of this dream world and into another.
• • •
But the machine-gun fire hadn’t resumed and The Corporal chanced another look over the top. Nothing had changed. No sounds of gunfire anywhere, and now the mortar rounds stopped.
He glanced down at Pechstein and the others, who were watching him.
“What do you see?” Pechstein asked.
“Nothing.”
“What about the Sarge? Can you see him?” Horvak asked. “Has he made it to the pillbox?”
“I told you, nothing’s moving out there,” The Corporal said sharply. He was getting spooked. He’d been through lulls on the battlefield before, but never like this one, which seemed to have dropped over them like a thick blanket.
He eased down and sat, his back against the boulders, his Grease Gun cradled between his knees.
“What’re we supposed to do?” Yablonski asked. Like the others, he looked up to The Corporal.
“Wait for the Sarge,” The Corporal replied absently. He was thinking of something, his focus on the here and now going soft.
“But what if he doesn’t come back? Fer Christ’s sake, we can’t sit here forever, waiting for somebody to show up.”
Here and now.
• • •
The place is here on the battlefield, the time is now, mid-November 1944, and the journey is just about to start.
• • •
But it isn’t the jungle battlefield he’s seeing with his mind’s eye. It’s a small town somewhere, maybe in the Midwest, and he can’t remember his name, or how he got there, except that the place seems to be deserted. Nothing moves, no sounds, not the rustling of the leaves in a breeze, not a child’s laugh or a dog’s bark.
But people were here just a second ago. He walks into a diner on Main Street and a burger is frying on the grill; a lit cigarette is perched on the edge of an ashtray. Across the street, he looks through the window of the barbershop and sees water dribbling from a faucet into the sink.
He turns around and races up the street. “No one’s here!” he shouts. “Everyone’s gone!”
Pechstein was there beside him, a wild look in his eyes. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“What do mean?”
“You were shouting something crazy.”
The Corporal shook his head. He couldn’t see the rest of it. The town, where the people had gone. The ending. But he desperately wanted to see, wanted to understand, because he felt that his life, his future, might depend on it.
Something nagging at the back of his head, something from the future-wonder stories he’d read as a boy, something just beyond his ken, wanting to take him away from this place, wanting to pull his concentration away from the struggle here to the mystery out there.
• • •
Up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits in the stars, waiting, waiting with the patience of aeons.
• • •
But he didn’t know what that meant. The thoughts were merely random snippets, popping off in his head like a photographer’s flashbulbs, clear for just an instant before nothing was left except the afterimage of a dark spot in the retina.
Pechstein and the others were watching him. They were worried. With the Sarge gone, The Corporal was all they had to lead them. He had a bachelor’s degree from Antioch, which meant he knew things none of them knew, he could figure out stuff. They were depending on him.
“Well, at least they’ve stopped shooting at us,” The Corporal said.
“Do you think it’s because of the Sarge?” Horvak asked. “Maybe he took out the pillbox.”
“We would have heard something,” Lamb said. He was the shy one of the squad and usually the butt of the jokes. But what he’d just said made sense, and no one ribbed him. They would have heard the Sarge’s Grease Gun, or maybe a grenade.
But nothing, and now this ominous silence.
The Corporal peered over the top of the boulders again, but still there was no sign of the Sarge.
“Anything?” Pechstein asked.
The Corporal dropped back and shook his head. “We’ll give him a couple more minutes.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll see,” The Corporal said, and suddenly he remembered something in the face of the young private who’d tried to run away and had gotten himself killed.
It had been a momentary flash of light, the sun streaming through the palm fronds ruffling in the breeze, and he’d
had the strangest sensation that he knew the kid was going to buy it.
• • •
U.S. Army paratroopers, Philippine Islands, gathered behind a pile of boulders in the middle of the jungle. Their sweating faces are covered in mud and grime and blood, their eyes wide with a curious mix of fear and resignation. Some of them will die, and all of them know it, though no one is sure who’ll be next. Except perhaps for one man who can see the light.
• • •
He could see the story in his head, visualize the men—Pechstein and Lamb and the others—he could even hear himself telling the Sarge, and later an officer in the rear, that he could see death. It was the light on their faces.
They didn’t believe him, and the more he tried to convince them that he had this terrible gift, the more they pushed him away, sending him back to the front.
“Why don’t you look in the mirror,” someone suggested.
And he remembered a line he’d read at Antioch from Shakespeare’s
Richard the Third: “He has come to open the purple testament of bleeding war.”
In his imagination they were calling him a nutcase, and here and now he was beginning to wonder if it was true. He was seeing things, hearing things, trying to step off the speeding train. The private wanted to go home, the businessman just wanted peace, and The Corporal wanted the same things.
He looked up into the sky, the sun low now off to the right, and thought for a moment that he’d heard the engines of an airplane. The Navy was flying air cover, but just not here today. Anyway the plane sounded too big to operate off an aircraft carrier, and they were too far from Australia for land-based planes.
It didn’t make any sense to The Corporal.
He looked over the boulders toward the hillock and then the pillbox. The Sarge was gone and it was up to him to make the decision.
“Check your ammo,” he told them. “We’re going in the same way the Sarge did.”
“Jesus,” Yablonski said, but they hurriedly did as they’d been instructed.
“I’m down to two magazines,” Lamb said.
“I only have two grenades,” Pechstein told him.
The Corporal had five grenades and five magazines of ammo plus the half-empty one in his weapon, which he swapped out for a full one.
“Lamb, strip the bodies,” he ordered. “Horvak, you and the rest of your guys help him. We’re going in with as much firepower as we can carry.”
They nodded, their eyes wide, and hurried off to do as they’d been ordered, their fear no less than before, but with a sense of relief that they were going to be doing something. They had an objective.
The Corporal thought he heard the airplane again, maybe above the clouds. Circling. Searching for something, maybe for a way down.
• • •
Unknown to the pilot and his crew, this airplane is heading into an uncharted region well off the beaten path, perhaps on an odyssey. Perhaps reported overdue and missing by now, the object of a frantic search on land and especially in the sea. An Army Air Corps plane trying to get home. But we know where she is, and maybe we should shoot up a flare or something.
• • •
“Who goes first,” Pechstein was saying, and The Corporal looked at him and the others blankly for just an instant.
The battlefield continued to be silent, and eerie, and The Corporal got the strong impression that he and his four squad mates were the last people on the planet. Even the plane circling overhead was gone.
“I’ll go first,” he said. “But spread out, left and right; keep low and keep firing.”
“Grenades?” Horvak asked.
“Save them until later,” The Corporal said. “Look, it’s only twenty-five yards and we’ll have a defilade.”
“Unless the Sarge is dead and we run into a trap,” Pechstein suggested. “Could be that’s just what they want us to do. They stop shooting and like a bunch of saps we run right out there into an ambush.”
The Corporal ignored him, looking up over the top of the boulders one last time. Still no movement.
“Let’s go,” he said. Without looking over his shoulder to make sure the four others were with him, he started running, half bent over at the waist, his legs pumping, and he began firing short bursts toward the pillbox.
Almost immediately Pechstein and the others opened fire.
The Corporal had another crazy thought: What if he could invent a time machine, to go back to just before the Japs manning the pillbox had been inducted into the service, and kill them? They wouldn’t be here now.
The Sarge’s body lay sprawled on the west side of the hillock, most of the front of his head blown away. He couldn’t be seen from behind the boulders.
The Corporal started to turn when the sniper’s bullet hit his wrist, fragmented, and the pieces slammed into his knee, knocking him to the ground.
Pechstein and the others were firing, and one of the guys started lobbing grenades over the hill, all of it in stop-action in The Corporal’s head.
He heard the airplane again, only this time there were two of them, small, fighters from off the aircraft carriers, come to the rescue.
Someone—Horvak or perhaps Lamb or perhaps both of them—dragged him to the safety of the hillock, and as he phased in an out of consciousness, he realized that if he didn’t die here in this place, today, in the island jungle twilight, he would be going home.
Pechstein loomed above, a big grin on his face. “Serling, can you hear me?” he said. “Listen, Rod, you’re going to be okay. You just got your million-dollar wound.”
Horvak was there too, smiling like a kid at a birthday. “Yeah, you’re going home.” He shook his head. “I’m gonna miss your stories.”
Lying wounded in the Leyte jungle, Corporal Rod Serling has his strangest thought of the day. There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area that might be called . . . the Twilight Zone.
Consider one Tanya Evans, a woman who believes she can mold any situation to her own desires. What Tanya desires most is a haunted house, or a country inn that she can advertise as haunted, since she is far too rational to believe in ghosts. But houses, haunted or not, contain their own unrealized desires, as Tanya is about to find out when she signs on the dotted line, opens her inn’s front door, and enters . . . the Twilight Zone.
T
anya couldn’t understand why realtors failed to recognize the commercial potential of haunted houses. This one, it seemed, was no different.
“Now, these railings need work,” the woman said as she led Tanya and Nathan out onto one of the balconies. “But the floor is structurally sound, and that’s the main thing. I’m sure these would be an attractive selling point to your bed-and-breakfast guests.”
Not as attractive as ghosts . . .
“You’re sure the house doesn’t have a history?” Tanya prodded again. “I thought I heard something in town. . . .”
She’d hadn’t, but the way the realtor stiffened told Tanya that she was onto something. After pointed reminders about disclosing the house’s full history, the woman admitted there was, indeed, something. Apparently a kid had murdered his family here, back in the seventies.
“A tragedy, but it’s long past,” the realtor assured her. “Never a spot of trouble since.”
“Damn,” Tanya murmured under her breath, and followed the realtor back inside.
Nathan wanted to check out the coach house, to see if there was any chance of converting it into a separate “honeymoon hideaway.”
Tanya was thrilled to see him taking an interest. Opening the inn had been her idea. An unexpected windfall from a great-aunt had come right after she’d lost her teaching job and Nathan’s office-manager position teetered under end-of-year budget cuts. It seemed li
ke the perfect time to try something new.
“You two go on ahead,” she said. “I’ll poke around in here, maybe check out the gardens.”
“Did I see a greenhouse out back?” Nathan asked the realtor.
She beamed. “You most certainly did.”
“Why don’t you go take a look, hon? You were talking about growing organic vegetables.”
“Oh, what a wonderful idea,” the realtor said. “That is so popular right now. Organic local produce is all the rage. There’s a shop in town that supplies all the . . .”
As the woman gushed, Tanya backed away slowly, then escaped.
The house was perfect—a six-bedroom, rambling Victorian perched on a hill three miles from a suitably quaint village. What more could she want in a bed-and-breakfast? Well, ghosts. Not that Tanya believed in such things, but haunted inns in Vermont were all the rage, and she was determined to own one.
When she saw the octagonal Victorian greenhouse, though, she decided that if it turned out there’d never been so much as a ghostly candle spotted on the property, she’d light one herself. She had to have this place.
She stepped inside and pictured it with lounge chairs, a bookshelf, maybe a little woodstove for winter. Not a greenhouse, but a sunroom. First, though, they’d need to do some serious weeding. The greenhouse—conservatory, she amended—sat in a nest of thorny vines dotted with red. Raspberries? She cleaned a peephole in the grime and peered out.
A head popped up from the thicket. Tanya fell back with a yelp. Sunken brown eyes widened, and wizened lips parted in a matching shriek of surprise.
Tanya hurried out as the old woman made her way from the thicket, a basket of red berries in one hand.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “We gave each other quite a fright.”
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 2
