“You’re crazy?”
“You saw me change.”
“I saw something.”
“You know what you saw.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” I got up and slipped the gun into its holster and took hold of the bars and said, “Tell me about yourself. Tell me now.”
“If I do, will you let me out?”
For a moment I didn’t know what to say to that. Finally I said, “Maybe.”
“Ha. You’re pulling my leg. You’re the law. You’re dedicated.”
“I don’t know if the law covers this,” I said. “I don’t know what I might do. I know this: what you got is a story, and I got a gun and you behind bars, and you say something’s coming, so it seems the problem is yours.”
“Something is coming all right, and if you’re in the way, it could bother you. It could do more than just bother. Look here. Listen up.” He stood up and spread his arms and stood under the light on the ceiling.
“What do you see?”
“A man.”
“Yes. But what is missing? What do you not see?”
I shook my head.
“Look at the floor where you stand. What do you see?”
I looked. I saw nothing, and said as much.
“No. You see something all right. Think about it . . . Here. Listen. Move to your right.”
I stepped to my right.
“What moved with you?” he asked.
“Nothing moved with me.”
“Look at me.”
I looked. He stepped right. “Look on the ground. What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Correct. Now follow me when I step left.”
He stepped left. “What do you see now?”
“Still nothing.”
He nodded. “Look at your feet again. Step left.”
I did.
“Step right.”
I did . . . and then I got it. I had a shadow and it moved with me. I jerked my head toward him and saw that where he had stood there was nothing. No shadow.
He stepped right, then left. He spun about like a top.
“My husk is empty,” he said. “I am without shadow.”
I took hold of the bars again, stood there trembling. I said, “Tell me.”
“Will it matter? Will you help me out?”
“Perhaps. Tell me.”
He sat down on the bunk again. “All right,” he said. “I will.”
“My troubles began during the War Between the States. For me that was a year or two after the war started. Eighteen sixty-two.”
“The Civil War?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You’re a time traveler?”
“In a way we all are time travelers. We travel from our date of birth until our date of death. We travel through time as it happens. Not around it, but through it. I am like that, same as you. But I have traveled farther and longer. I was born in 1840. I fought in the Civil War. I was killed in 1864.”
“Killed?” I said.
“I was struck by a musket ball, during . . . Never mind. The where and how of it is unimportant. But I was struck dead and laid down in a shallow grave, and I was uncovered by wild dogs who meant to tear at my flesh. I know this because she told me.”
I took my seat on the bench again. I didn’t know what to think. What to feel.
“An old woman chased the dogs away and finished digging me up and took me home and I came alive again on her kitchen table, stretched out there naked as the day I was born, my chest and legs covered in designs made in chicken blood. Standing by the table with a big fruit jar full of something dark was the old woman. And she told me then I was hers. She was a witch. A real witch. She had rescued me from death and brought me to life with a spell, but she had kept my shadow; had torn it away from me with her enchantments. If I had it back, she said, after being brought back from the dead, I would die as others die, and I would not have the powers that I have now.”
“The shape changing?” I said.
Wilson, for I knew no other name by which to call him, nodded. “That, and my ability to live on and on and on.”
“And the jar of shadow?”
“She kept it on a shelf. My shadow was small at first, minuscule, like a piece of folded cloth. As time went on, it swelled and filled the jar. The jar could only hold my shadow for so long, and when it swelled enough, the jar would break, unless moved to some larger container, but once it was free, it could never be contained again. Even then, as long as I stayed away from it, I would remain ageless, be able to change my shape. But, if it found me, it would take me and I would age the way I should have aged; all the years that had passed would collect inside me, turn me inside out.”
“Why didn’t the witch use the spell on herself, to keep from aging?”
“Because you had to be young for it to work, or so she told me. But perhaps it was because she knew that eventually, no matter what it was contained within, it would get out. You had to worry about it forever pursing you, forever fleeing.
“As time went on, my shadow grew, and the old woman placed the jar in a crock, and one day we heard the jar crack inside the crock, and we knew the shadow was growing. During the day I did her bidding. I chopped and gathered wood. I worked her garden. I cooked her meals and washed her clothes. At night I lay on the floor in the thin clothes she had given me, shivering or sweating, according to the weather, unable to move because of the magic marks the old witch had made on my body. And my shadow, I could hear it moving around inside the crock, like insects in a hive.
“Then, one morning I awoke and nothing held me. The spell was broken. In the night the old woman had died. I buried the crock deep in the ground inside the floorless cabin and I set the place on fire and burned it and the old woman’s body up. I went away then, walking as fast and as far as I could go.
“All I could think about was my shadow. When I lay down at night I felt as if I could hear it swell inside that crock, under the ground, and that it was breaking free, and coming up through the earth, taking to the wind, moving deliberately after me. I knew this as surely as if I could see it. I knew this because it was part of me and it was missing. I knew it traveled only at night, and found dark places during the day, for it had lost its host, and without me, it couldn’t stand the light of day. I knew all of this instinctively, the way a chicken knows to set a nest, the way a fish knows to swim or a dog knows to bark.
“I moved across the land, year after year, ahead of my shadow, moving when it moved, at night, sleeping during the days, sometimes, but often driving day and night until exhaustion took me. The decades ticked by. I grew weary. That’s why I was in the car during the night when I should have been moving. I slept the day and planned to move on when night came. Kept telling myself, You’re too tired to drive. Just a few more minutes. A half hour. And then you can go. It’s only just dark. Thoughts like that; the kind of thoughts an exhausted man thinks. I had been that way before, all tuckered out, and it had almost caught me. I was down with some disease or another. Down for three days, and I awoke, some kind of internal clock ticking louder and louder, and I knew it was near. This was over a hundred years ago, that near catch, and I still remember it sharp as a moment ago. The air turned cold in the dead of summer, and the world felt strange and out of whack, as if something had tilted. I took a horse and rode out. As I rode, I looked back, and there it was, a dark swirl of gloom tumbling toward me, dead as a distant star.
“I whipped that horse and rode it until it keeled over. I whipped it to its feet, rode it until it fell over dead. I ran on foot and found a barn and stole another horse, rode it for miles. I caught a train and just kept going. But it had been close. I had felt it coming, and that had saved me. I feel that way now. In this damn cell I’ll meet my Waterloo, and there you’ll stand, watching it happen.”
I stood there for a long moment, and then I got the cell key and opened the door. I said, “Not if you run.”
Wi
lson stood up and adjusted his hat and came out of the cell, showed me a thin smile. “Bless you . . . By the way. The real name, it’s Elton Bloodline. Thank you, thank you.”
“Go!”
I followed as Bloodline moved swiftly to the door, opened it, and stepped out. The wind was chill and Bloodline stopped as if something wet had crawled up his spine; he went white under the overhanging light. He turned his head and looked, and I looked too.
Way down the street, the darkness pulsed and moved toward us on the breeze; it twisted and balled and sometimes resembled a giant dark and faceless man, running.
“It’s found me.” Bloodline seemed frozen to the spot. “Torn away, and now it’s coming back.”
I grabbed his arm. “Come. Come with me. Now!”
He came alert then. We darted to the police car. He got in and I got behind the wheel and started up the engine and drove away in a roar and a squeal of tires.
I glanced in the rearview. And there it was, a shadow man, maybe ten feet high, passing under streetlights, pulling their glow into its ebony self. It ran swiftly on what looked like long, wide, black, paper-wobbly legs, and then its legs fluttered out from under it and it was a writhing wraith, a tumbleweed of darkness.
I put my foot to the floor and the car jumped and we put space between us and it, and then I hit something in the road, a pothole maybe, but whatever it was it was a big bad bump and the right front tire blew. The car swerved and the back end spun to where the front should have been. As it did, through the windshield I saw that the shadow looked like an inkblot, then I saw lights from the streetlamps, and then the car flipped and bounced and I didn’t see much of anything for a while.
I couldn’t have been out longer than a few seconds. When I awoke, I discovered that I was hanging upside down. Through habit, I had fastened my seat belt. Bloodline, in his haste and fear, had not; he was wadded up on the ceiling of the car and he was starting to move. I unfastened my belt and managed not to drop too hard or too fast by bracing my hands on the ceiling of the car and twisting my feet around to catch myself. I glanced about. The front and back glass were still intact. The glass on the driver’s side was knocked out and the passenger’s side was cracked in such a way that you couldn’t see out of it.
Bloodline sat up, shook his head, and looked at me. I saw the hope drain out of him and he began to shake. “You tried,” he said, and then the car was flung upright and we crashed together, and then I heard glass break, and a big dark hand jutted through the shattered windshield. It grabbed at Bloodline. He tried to slide backward, but it stretched and followed and got him around the waist. I grabbed his legs and tugged, but the thing was strong. It pulled him through the glass, cutting him with jagged shards stuck together by the windshield’s safety goo, and then it pulled so hard that he was snatched from my grasp.
I wiggled through the busted-out driver’s window, and on my hands and knees I crawled along the street, glass sticking into my hands, the reek of spilled fuel in the air. I got to one knee and looked; I saw that Bloodline’s shadow was completely in the shape of a large man. It had grown from only moments ago, standing now twenty feet high and four feet wide. It lifted Bloodline high into the air, tilted its head back, and carefully swallowed him.
The shadow swelled and vibrated. There was a pause, and then it throbbed even more. With a sound like metal being torn, it grew smaller, rapidly. Smaller and smaller, and then, there it stood, a shadow the shape and size of a man. It looked at me, or would have had it had eyes. The darkness it was made of began to whirl in upon itself. The shape grew pale, and finally it was Bloodline standing there, the way I’d seen him before, but nude, his suit and hat and shoes all gone; his nude body shivering in the wind. He looked at me and a strange expression ran across his face, the kind you might have when someone points a loaded gun at you and you know he is going to pull the trigger. He turned his head and looked to his left, and there, poking out from him, framed by the streetlights behind him, was his shadow.
Then he withered. He bent and he bowed and his skin creaked and his bones cracked, and his flesh began to fall in strips off his broken skeleton. The strips fell into the street and the bones came down like dominoes dropped, rattled on the concrete; the skull rolled between my feet. When I looked down at it, it was grinning, and shadows moved behind the sockets, and then even they were gone and the darkness that replaced them was thin. The skull collapsed. I stepped back, let out an involuntary cry.
Then all of it, the skull, the bones, and the strips of flesh, were caught up on the chill wind, and then they were dust, and then they were gone, and then the air warmed up and the night brightened, and the lights all along the street seemed clearer and I was left standing there, all alone.
So the journey of Mr. Wilson, aka, Mr. Bloodline, ends with a splash of darkness and a scream, emphasizing that no one can outrun fate. He and his pursuer have become one, and in the wink of an eye they have been hurtled across a great void, into that narrow yet diverse and shadowy region of unique sight and sound . . . called the Twilight Zone.
Within every human heart lies the desire for fame. The need to have one’s achievements praised, one’s stature and skills applauded, one’s name and face recognized by an admiring public.
But fame, like her cousin wealth, is a capricious lady. Even as she smiles upon her chosen ones, she deftly weaves golden chains into their lives, chains that grow ever thicker, stronger, and harder to remove. Chains that remain as long as those who wear them count the lady as their traveling companion.
Some revel under the weight of those chains. Others end up crushed beneath them. Others seek a way to cheat the system, to eliminate the chains without giving up the glow of the lady’s smile.
Sometimes, they succeed.
R
usty Lanford had always considered himself a reasonable enough man. But when a particularly audacious paparazzo named Browser tried to take a shot up Natalie’s skirt at the restaurant, he’d finally had enough.
The cop who arrested him was sympathetic enough. So was the sergeant who booked him.
“Can’t really blame you, Mr. Lanford,” the latter said apologetically as he rolled Lanford’s fingers over the ink pad and then onto the arrest form. “If those guys hounded me like they do you, I’d want to take a swing at them, too. But we’ve got laws say you can’t do that.”
“There must be something you can do,” Lanford insisted in the persuasive baritone he’d used to such effect in Return from the Sierra. “What about Ms. O’Keefe? She’s not a public figure. Can’t you give her protection from this kind of harassment?”
“Wish I could, Mr. Lanford, wish I could,” the sergeant said regretfully. The baritone was clearly not having any effect on the man, Lanford saw. Maybe he should have used the resonant bass from Day of the Dark instead. “You can wash up over there, and then we’ll take you back to post bail. By the way, love your work.”
The upside was that the L.A.-area police departments had long since gotten this thing down to a science, and Lanford was back on the street in less than an hour. The downside was that the paparazzi were waiting out there for him when he emerged. He walked stolidly through the gauntlet of electronic flashes, giving them nothing but the impassive expression of his deaf-mute in A Scream from Within, and made it to where Natalie was waiting with his car.
A few of the more-adventurous vermin were also waiting in their cars, and gave chase as their targets headed off into the night. But Lanford knew the city, and he knew a few tricks, and within two miles he’d lost them.
It was only a temporary victory, of course. They all knew where he lived.
Natalie knew it too. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather skip the nightcap and just go home,” she said as he left a tangle of winding residential streets and turned back onto the boulevard. “It’s been a long night.”
“Sure,” Lanford said in his soothing, sympathetic voice, even as he privately ground his teeth in frustration. Tonight was suppos
ed to be the night where he turned up the charm and got her under the sheets. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
He parked the car two blocks from her apartment building for their good-night kiss, just in case any of the vermin were hanging around her place, then drove her the rest of the way. Sure enough, a couple of flashes went off as she got out of the car, stopping only when it became clear that Lanford wasn’t going to get out with her.
He drove back to his house, cursing under his breath as once again he had to drive through a barrage of flashes to get inside the community’s gate. A water cannon, he thought as he parked the car in the garage and trudged inside. A nice water cannon with a remote control I can hose them down with. No law against giving people a free shower, is there?
But there probably was.
He was undressing for bed—alone, dammit—when he found the card in his jacket pocket. Frowning, he peered at it.
“You didn’t see me put this in your pocket,” it read in neat, precise letters. “The paparazzi won’t see you, either. Call me anytime.”
He turned the card over. The only thing on the other side was an embossed name—Janick Winsley—and a Beverly Hills phone number.
It was a joke, obviously. Someone must have slipped the card into his pocket while he was punching Browser’s lights out, or maybe planted it later at the police station.
But Lanford was pretty good about keeping his personal space personal. He should have noticed if anyone got that close.
He looked at the bedside clock. It was nearly two in the morning. Still, the man had said “anytime.” Picking up his cell, he punched in the number on the card.
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 14
