Space and Time Issue 121

by Hildy Silverman

  As one of the small township’s two dispatchers, Dana would have her finger (or rather her ear) on the pulse of what was predicted to be the biggest storm in living memory. Some small part of her was looking forward to it, to throwing herself into something that wouldn’t leave room for thinking about anything else. Mostly, though, Dana was just frightened.

  The truth was that she hadn’t been asleep when the chief called. The bad dreams were back, visions of massive, empty spaces. It was strange to dream of places, but seeing them filled her with foreboding and an aching sense of loss. Worse was the voice. Familiar and yet unrecognizable, it whispered, “Something bad is coming.” She almost hadn’t answered her phone when it rang, chirping and rumbling its way across her nightstand. She was still wrapped in the desolate terror of her dream. She felt better by the time she got off the phone with the chief, if only a little, and she’d all but forgotten about it by the time she arrived at the station.

  But that eerie sense of foreboding was back now, stronger than before. The phone on her desk was going off with its accompaniment of flashing lights, and Dana didn’t want to answer it. It was an insane thought, she knew, but she was sure that the voice on the other end would be familiar.

  “Something bad is coming,” she said, but then reason took back over. With the storm someone could be stuck in an overturned vehicle, or stranded, or caught outdoors. Dana answered the phone.

  “911. Where is your emergency?”

  At first there was no reply, only the crackle and hiss of what might have been a bad connection or the receiver on the other end picking up the storm itself. When the voice finally came through, it was only in brief, frantic snatches.

  “...God! Please...”

  On any other day, the CAD would have detected the caller’s location and placed it on a map for Dana to relay to responders immediately. With the system down, she had to get the information herself. She focused on staying calm. The woman’s panic would be contagious.

  “Ma’am, please. Can you tell me the address of your emergency?”

  The signal went in and out. The panicked woman screamed, “Please...I’m...Lane...my baby!”

  “Ma’am? I’m sorry, the connection is bad. You’ll have to tell me that again.”

  “Help!...some man...the shed. Please, send...”

  Dana’s fingers trembled as her hands hovered over her keyboard, hoping for something to key in. Outside, an especially heavy peal of thunder made the windows shake in their frames. If Dana didn’t know better, she would have thought the storm was laughing.

  The signal cleared. “Hello? Oh God, please don’t hang up.”

  “I’m here,” Dana said. “Please give me your address. I have officers standing by.”

  After a breathless moment where Dana thought the call had dropped, the woman finally spoke, but this time not to her. “What are you doing with my baby? Jesus, please! Give him to me!”

  Dana could hear a child screaming now. The sound turned her belly cold and sour, but what followed was even worse. Screaming and incomprehensible, deaf to Dana’s pleas, the sounds of a struggle started. She’s going after him, Dana thought.

  The phone crashed to the ground. The struggle was brutal and short, punctuated with grunts and a single scream. The silence after was worse. A tear rolled down Dana’s face as she spoke over and over into the receiver, knowing nobody would pick up.

  Except someone did. Dana could hear him breathing as he lifted the receiver. Nearby the baby was crying again.

  “Hello?” Dana asked, her voice cracking. “Is someone there? Please tell me where you are and we’ll send someone to help.”

  “I hit her,” he said. “Don’t worry, she’s just unconscious. Why didn’t she listen?”

  Dana’s first thought was that the man was crying. Her second thought took the breath right from her. “Michael?”

  Her husband let out a ragged sigh. “Yes.”

  “Oh my God! Mike, what are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry, Dana. I...I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Do what? Are you insane? What the hell is going on, Mike? Where are you?”

  “Some house.” Mike sounded listless, empty. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t do it.” He shifted the phone to his other ear. The sound of the baby’s crying drew closer. “He reminds me of Adam, Dana.”

  Adam. The name came like a blow. “Adam?” she asked in a daze. Dana remembered the hot lights of a hospital room, and searing pain so strong she felt drunk on it. And she remembered knowing that something was wrong. She saw it in the not-quite-businesslike faces of the nurses and doctors around her. Something bad is coming.

  “Yes, he has the same eyes.”

  Dana closed her own eyes, squeezing out more tears. That lifeless form they had pulled from her, which she had carried for seven and a half months, which they had once thought to call Adam, never opened his eyes.

  “Oh, Michael. What have you done?”

  “Do you remember what Adam said?” Mike asked.

  What Adam said. It had been one of their favorite games to play when Dana was still pregnant. “Here,” Dana would say and pull Mike’s head down to her swollen belly. “Adam’s telling us something. Can you hear it?” They’d tell each other anything and everything in Adam’s name, about how he was hungry or tired, or how he had given up rooting for the Cubs. Mike even recited some lines from a Shakespeare play once.

  “What did Adam tell you, Mike?” Dana was almost whispering now. She felt alone in the station. Luckily, everyone else was so wrapped up in the other crises they were managing that nobody seemed to notice her.

  “You remember.”

  When Mike said that she thought of her dreams. A vision of a desolate landscape rose unbidden, and with it came those familiar sensations–loss, emptiness, despair. She shook her head, as if to clear it. “No,” she said. “I don’t...”

  “Something bad is coming.”

  Those words, Dana thought. A familiar voice, but not the one from her dream. Still, she felt terror rising from her gut. As a dispatcher, she was trained to ask questions, to keep people talking so they would stay calm, or to buy time for responders to arrive. She found herself asking a question now that made her want to be sick. “Who is coming, Mike?”

  “I don’t know.” Mike sounded frustrated. “Adam showed me, but I don’t remember. All I see is destruction. It’s coming with the storm, Dana. It’s almost here. Do you hear it?”

  She did. Outside, the storm had risen to a fever pitch. Lights flickered as lightning struck nearby. The wind was strong enough that items on shelves trembled. A deep and powerful blast of thunder sounded more like an animal’s growl than the product of a storm. Dana found herself thinking of a night when “what Adam said” was that he wanted to hear a story. I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in. A mad giggle snuck up on her, but she managed to stifle it. The young woman who had sheltered in the station was visible across the station, comforting her baby, trying to get it to stop crying.

  Dana frowned and turned her attention wholly back to the phone. She needed to focus if she was going to help her husband. “Why are you in that house, Michael? Why don’t you tell me the address and I’ll send someone to pick you up. You can come to the station here with me and we’ll talk about Adam.” She felt the name hitch in her throat even as she said it. We should have talked more, she thought. Is this my fault?

  “He told us we could stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Whatever is riding the storm. Adam told me how. He showed me what would happen if I didn’t, but I can’t do it. I can’t do it, Dana.”

  “How do you stop it, Mike?” Dana asked, but she already knew the answer.

  “Sacrifice. Like in the old stories. Once that happens this...thing will go away. Do you think Adam was an angel, Dana?”

>   He was my angel, she thought. Before she could answer him aloud, a screeching burst of static erupted from her headset. She had to pull it from her ear, it was so sudden and loud. After a moment she put it back on.

  Mike was yelling, “It’s happening, Dana! It’s here! Please, you need to do something.”

  “Mike? What’s going on, Mike? Talk to me!”

  There was horror on the other end of the line. The static–so like the sound of the rain–had given way to the strangest thunder she had ever heard. It pulsed, like something vast and terrible breathing. Windows began crashing and Mike screamed. There was a great shuddering groan that might have been the whole house shifting–it has to be the house, she thought madly. Dana called to her husband over and over, but the line was dead.

  She sat for a long time, staring blankly at her computer screen, letting the dial tone drone through the headset. She had taken it off when the line went dead, but she couldn’t bring herself to hang up the call. She looked up dumbly when the sound of the storm outside changed to something new, something ever more terrible.

  “Little pig, little pig, let me in,” she recited.

  Something bad was coming. She could feel it now as well as hear it. Something vast and ancient, riding the storm. Its breath was like thunder. Just like Adam said. It would destroy them all, as it had Mike.

  Dana stood–she really wasn’t sore at all anymore–and walked from her desk. She did not rush, knowing somehow that she would have enough time. When she opened the door to the interrogation room, she was calm and collected. The young mother and her beautiful child were there, both afraid of the storm that had turned so strange, but comforted by where they were. No safer place in the world, Dana thought.

  “He reminds me of my son,” Dana said. She reached out for the child. “May I hold him?”

  * * *

  J. A. Bradley is an author of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, but his geekery knows no bounds. He lives in Central New Jersey with his wife and family, and too many computers. He won the annual Garden State Speculative Writers (GSSW) short story contest with What Adam Said. Find him online at jabradley.com.

  STIRLING SILLIPHANT AND ’60s SF

  by Daniel M. Kimmel

  We’ve heard it many times: the director, actor or writer who claims their latest project isn’t “really” science fiction, it’s “about people.” Legendary screenwriter Stirling Silliphant was no different, yet along with working on the landmark television series “Route 66” and winning an Oscar for “In the Heat of the Night” he did three science fiction movies. One of them was the cheesy “The Swarm,” which was part of the cycle of ’70s disaster movies he helped create with “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.” Two others bookend the 1960s and are worthy of reconsideration.

  In the interests of full disclosure I should note that my friend and colleague Nat Segaloff has recently written Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (Bear Manor Media), which is a fascinating look at one of the most successful screenwriters of the era. In an industry where the writer is often overlooked in our worship of stars and directors, it’s an important contribution to Hollywood history. For our purposes, though, it’s an excuse to revisit “Village of the Damned” (1960) and “Charly” (1968).

  Silliphant adapted “Village” from John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The film is a taut 77 minute thriller in which one day everyone in an English village collapses unconscious. (We later find out this scene was replicated in several places around the world.) It is an eerie sequence in which we see not only cars and buses crashed to a halt, but postmen lying in the road, a telephone operator slumped at her switchboard, and similar shots of people fallen wherever they were. It’s similar to something Robert Wise would do a decade later in his film of “The Andromeda Strain.”

  After several hours the people awaken as if nothing happened, yet two months later it’s clear something did happen: every fertile woman in the village is now pregnant. There is little thought given to how this was accomplished or how or why some alien force might do this. Instead we see tearful virgins insisting they can’t possibly be pregnant, and smoldering men who know they can’t possibly be the fathers. When the children are born they not only mature rapidly, but they look weirdly alike, all blonde and with unusual eyes that glow when they are upset. We discover the children can not only read minds—each other’s as well as the adults around them—but use mind control to cause those who cross them to suffer or die.

  It’s a horrific “what if” situation and Silliphant, lacking any science fiction background, hewed closely to the mood and themes of Wyndham’s novel with the exception of moving the action to America. The film had been intended to be shot by MGM in California but, according to Silliphant, that was until the head of MGM, Robert H. O’Brien, read the script. O’Brien, a Catholic, was apparently deeply offended by the suggestion of alien virgin births, and the project was cancelled. It resurfaced as an MGM production in England where director Wolf Rilla and writer George Barclay attached their names to the script for doing little more than transposing the story back to England. Silliphant told Segaloff that if the Writer’s Guild—which arbitrates screen credits—had been stronger in those days with regard to overseas productions, he would have been given sole credit.

  As it was, one of the most memorable elements of the film, besides the creepy kids, was how Professor Zellaby (George Sanders) finally defeats them. He meets with the children with a time bomb in his briefcase, but in order to prevent them learning of it he thinks of a brick wall. That image of the wall starts to crumble but lasts long enough for his scheme to reach its climactic conclusion. Silliphant said that device was all his own.

  Viewed today, the film holds up amazingly well. In spite of being in black and white and with nearly all the violence taking place off-camera, it makes us wonder and be frightened by the notion of impregnation from the stars. By keeping the action strictly on Earth it raises all sorts of issues, from parents viewing their children as aliens to how different cultures react to this surreptitious invasion. The Russians, for example, use a nuclear device on the entire village that was infected, killing everyone, not just the children.

  “Charly,” based on the short story and novel Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, is another matter. The book has been adapted numerous times for film and television as well as in different languages, but the 1968 movie which earned its star Cliff Robertson his Oscar is probably the best known. Robertson had appeared in a 1961 television adaptation and in order to ensure he would be in the movie version, acquired the movie rights himself.

  The story is about Charlie, a genial man who is mentally impaired and ekes out a living as a janitor. He takes adult education classes in an attempt to become smarter and his teacher Alice (Claire Bloom) gets him considered for an experimental procedure that will boost his intelligence. As with the aliens in “Village,” the precise nature of the procedure is left vague and obscure, but it has worked on a lab mouse named Algernon and they are ready to try it on a human subject. “Charly,” like its source story, is a tragedy about a man who is given what he most wants only to lose it all. It is even more poignant because before the effects fade he has become a genius, and thus has full knowledge of what he is losing and where he is heading.

  Silliphant, though, now had his Oscar and Oscar-winning writers were supposed to do serious things. He told Segaloff, “I didn’t want to write a science fiction piece.” He explains that meant not explaining the procedure, which misses the point. The science fiction element is the impact that the procedure has on Charlie and those around him, and here the film fumbles as much as it scores.

  The early scenes with Robertson showing the mentally stunted Charley have an awkwardness to them. It’s all too obvious that this is a Hollywood star strenuously trying to make a mentally retarded character sympathetic. It doesn’t help that veteran TV direc
tor Ralph Nelson has overlit all the scenes to the point that one thinks Charlie has a permanent set of klieg lights following him, heightening the artificiality of the film. While Charlie’s growing intelligence is sensitively portrayed—he has been competing against Algernon trying to solve a maze and has previously been losing—the third act of the story is just a mess.

  The point is made that in spite of his intelligence Charlie is still a child in many ways, and when he finally acts out on his growing feelings towards his teacher she lashes out at him and asks why he thought she would ever take a “moron” like him seriously. The situation is realistic, making Charlie akin to Frankenstein’s monster in lacking the maturity and acculturation to act properly, but her response is shocking, not in defending herself but in suggesting that her sympathy for him all along was just a ruse and that she always thought of him as nothing but a “moron.”

  The film then presents an embarrassing sequence in which Charlie goes off to experience various “lifestyles” presented in a series of choppy and overlapping images that critics at the time said seemed to have been influenced by films made for exhibits at Montreal’s Expo ’67. The sequence concludes with Charlie and Alice entering into a serious relationship without any indication that either one has dealt with the incident that drove them apart. Charlie’s diminishing intelligence is likewise handled badly, with a sequence where he seems to be running away from his earlier self. More effective is a scene in a bar where a mentally impaired busboy drops a tray of glassware. As everyone in the bar laughs, Charlie goes over and helps him pick up the pieces.

  “Charly” might survive its dated visuals if Silliphant (and Robertson and Nelson) hadn’t seemed to have missed the point of the novel. It had its impact from getting the reader to see the world through Charlie’s eyes. At the book’s end Charlie writes to his teacher and asks her to put flowers on Algernon’s grave, a touching moment because Charlie has followed the mouse’s arc and whether he will die soon or not, it is an implied request that he be remembered for what he once was. The movie ends after Charlie refuses Alice’s offer of marriage and sends her away, and then cuts to her some time later watching Charlie childishly grinning on a seesaw. It ends the movie on a note of what she has lost, which seems a mistake.