Rod Sellings	i APRIL 1984 $2.50

ANNIVERSARY ISSUE m

Celebrate with SCOTT GLENN 1

BURGESS MEREDITH ||

KATE CAPSHAW 1

of Raiders II *

Ten new tales of fantasy and horror

Story contest winners

TZ IQ test

And (would you believe) a love story by RICHARD MATHESON

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TZ CONTEST WINNERS March/April 1984

Invitation to a Party		Jon Cohen	33
Denny at Midnight		Pamela J. Jessen	36
Dog		Bertram W. G. Doyle	38
'Wanna Bet?'		E. Walter Suba, Jr.	40
FICTION
The Last Voyage of Sinbad		Lee Duigon	42
Blunder Buss		Richard Matheson	55
Judgment Day		Jack C. Haldeman II	59
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You		Oliver Lowenbruck	60
God Shed His Grace		Evan Eisenberg	70
A Little Two-Chair Barber Shop on Phillips Street		Donald R. Burleson	72
FEATURES
In the Twilight Zone			6
A Note from the Publisher		Carol Serling	8
Scott Glenn: Now He Can Say No		Lorenzo Carcaterra	24
TZ Interview; Burgess Meredith		James H. Bums	26
TZ Screen Preview; 'Dreamscape'		James Vemiere	50
Kate Capshaw; Dream Come True		James Vemiere	52
You Saw Them in 'The Twilight Zone'		Bill Bauernfeind	75
Show-by-Show Guide to 'The Outer Limits': Part Two		David J. Schow	82
Beyond the Zone		Feggo	89
TZ Classic Teleplay: 'Mr. Dingle, The Strong'		Rod Serling	90
TZ Classifieds			102
OTHER DIMENSIONS
Books		Thomas M. Disch	10
Screen		Gahan Wilson	14
Nostalgia: Urban Tales of Tarzan		Ron Goulart	17
A 'Twilight Zone' Trivia Quiz	•	Gary Frisch	20
Etc.			22
Cover photo of David Patrick Kelly from Droamscape courtesy Zuprik-Curtls Enterprises, Inc.

33 36 38 40 42 55 59 60 70 72

4 Twilight Zone

Photo credits: Matheson/Morc Scott Zicree; Schow/Trini Ruiz.

The Winners’ Circle

Baby-sitters are ideal subjects for horror tales. They make excellent victims, but in a pinch they'll serve equally well as villains. The Sitter as Victim is young, attractive, and, above all, vulnerable, all alone in a strange dark house with nothing but some sleeping kids for company.

She's Carol Kane in When a Stranger Calk, fending off a psychopath, or the girl in Robert Coover’s "The Babysitter," playing out the author's erotic fantasies. In the course of a night she may find herself dealing with intruding teenage thugs, satanic juveniles, or amorous employei4.

Sitters can play an entirely different role, however, more menacing than menaced: whatever their age, sex, and attractiveness, they are outsiders, sometimes outright strangers, to whom we entrust our home and children— a situation whose inherent terror is skillfully exploited by JON COHEN in this year's prizewinning story. Invitation to a Parti/. Cohen, a South Carolinian now living in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, has a degree in English from Connecticut College and one in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania. He says that except for winning a wallet in a seventh-grade dance conipetition and the $500 prize from Twilight Zone, his life has been unremarkable — but it's clear to us that his talent is remarkable indeed.

Children's vulnerability, a theme that runs through Cohen's story, receives a considerably gentler treatment from our second prizewinner, PAMELA J. JESSEN, who describes herself as "a member of a vanishing species: a mother who stays home with her kids — and writes." She lives with her husband and two sons in Colorado Springs; B.K., she says — Before Kids — she worked for a large insurance company and for a small education center on a U.S. air base in Germany. Her story Denny at Midnight is the fruit of a creative writing class — took it to get myself going again

after all the years of mundane living" — and a local writers' group.

Now living in Takoma Park, Maryland, BERTRAM W.G. DOYLE, our third-place winner, grew up playing handball in New York City's 200th Street IND station ("You miss, you jump down on the tracks and get the ball") and reading Heinlein, Tom Swift, and New Wave science fiction. Later he moved to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where he was informed in no uncertain terms that he would never be another Hemingway. Still, he kept writing; his first submission was to Harlan Ellison's Last Dangerous Visions. Dog is his first attempt at supernatural fantasy; it is based, he says, "on an actual event that ended differently."

This year, like last, we couldn't resist adding an extra short-short to our winners' circle — and it's another story about kids. Its author,

E. WALTER SUBA, JR., is a staff photographer for the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette. "Writing sf, fantasy, and especially horror has always been a closet passion for me," he says, "but I've been too lazy to sit down and do the work" — which may explain the admirable brevity of his story “Wanna Bet?" The idea came to him while he was sitting on the front porch watching the neighborhood children fight and abuse one another. "I kept thinking of Art Linkletter's line, 'Kids say the darnedest things.' I just carried it a step further and let them do the darnedest things."

One thing they'll do, if you let them, is make up outlandishly hard trivia quizzes like the one in this issue by GARY FRISCH; or even interview Burgess Meredith, as JAMES H. BURNS has done. Okay, they're not exactly kids — the one is seventeen, the other's twenty-one — but that sounds awfully young to me. Frisch is a senior at Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey and hopes to major in communications at college next year. His quiz — the first work he's ever had published — is taken

Doyle Suba

from a book he's recently completed. In the Twilight Zone: Trivia from the Fifth Dimension. (Marc Zicree, look out!) Burns, on the other hand, has been widely published indeed: Gentleman's Quarterly, American Film, Heavy Metal, Esquire, Family Computing — and that's just in the past year. He also conducted our special two-part 1981 interview with RICHARD MATHESON, one of the prime creative forces behind both the Twilight Zone tv series and the recent Warner Bros, movie. (Look for his "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in our next issue.) Blunder Buss presents this master of terror in a distinctly lighter mood.

Another ace interviewer, LORENZO CARCATERRA, who talked to V. C. Andrews in the June '83 TZ, touches base this time with Scott Glenn. Carcaterra moved from New York's Daily News to a staff writer's job on Time's TV Cable Week and is now doing the same on People. We think it's high time he wrote a piece on TZ.

BILL BAUERNFEIND will probably score high on this issue's quiz. He's been a Twilight Zone fan since the show’s inception and even enjoyed a brief correspondence with Rod Serling. He makes his living as a teacher (now second grade, formerly junior high school photography and media courses) in Skokie, Illinois. His article traces the careers of Twilight Zone alumni; we've added some additional material by ALLAN ASHERMAN ("Forerunners of The Twilight Zone," September '81 TZ).

Barbers don't seem to inspire quite the same fantasies that baby- sitters do (funny about that) — in fact. I'm hard-pressed to think of any noteworthy barber stories outside

6 Twilight Zone

Matheson

Haldeman

Burleson

Schow

Bauernfeind

Burns

Duigon

Davis Grubb's "Return of Verge Likens" and the legend of Sweeney Todd-but DONALD R. BURLESON has come up with one in A Little Two-Chair Barber Shop on Phillips Street. The name, appropriately, is a homage to the classic horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, on whom Burleson is an expert, having written about him for Magill's new five- volume Survey of Modem Fantasy Literature and the journal Lovecraft Studies, as well as in his own H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study, just out from Greenwood Press. Burleson has also authored several math textbooks; he's an associate professor of mathematics at Rivier College in Nashua, New Hampshire, but he's taught courses on Lovecraft as well.

There's another touch of HPL — the Lovecraft of "The Nameless City"-in LEE DUIGON's The Last Voyage of Sinbad. Duigon, whose Metuchen, New Jersey, seems a long way from Baghdad, sf>ent six years as a newspaper editor and reporter but eventually turned to other pursuits. "When I couldn't get a job as a zoo keeper," he says, "I turned to writing." He's been published in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine and Sorcerer's Apprentice. JACK C. HALDEMAN II is an sf novelist (Perry's Planet; There Is No Darkness), but in our pages he's a master of the short-short: "Open Fra.me" in last August's issue, now the provocative Judgment Day. Freelance writer EVAN EISENBERG, who first appeared in TZ with "Heimlich's Curse"

(November '81), is back with a wry and wistful vision of The Day After.

Stories about Vietnam veterans seem to bring out the worst in many writers; all too often they're excuses for macho chest-thum]3ing and a

curious kind of in-the-know elitism. ("Nam"-dropping, I guess you'd call it.) But Coming Soon to a Theater Near You was both horrifying and humane enough to overcome my prejudices. Its author, OLIVER LOWENBRUCK, lives in Hollywood — "in the heart of the beast," as he says — and in this past year has worked on novel series (under a pseudonym) for both Universal and Berkley. This is his second appearance in TZ.

DAVro J. SCHOW continues his history of The Outer Limits. I wish we had full pages for some of the wonderful stills he's provided, especially that one from "Nightmare," in which, when the photo's enlarged, the m.onstrous-looking "Ebonite Inter- rogator" can be seen wearing a pair of BVDs beneath his black body-stocking.

ERRATUM: TZ reader Robert Penwick writes: "I didn't realize the great Barrymore could transform himself into such a perfect vision of Charlie Ruggles."

Well, he couldn't, actually. But we managed to turn Charlie Ruggles into John Barrymore in our last issue when we miscaptioned a still from The Invisible Woman in Ron Goulart's column. It wasn't Ron's fault, it was ours; we'd relied on information that came attached to the photo. Writes Robert Bloch: "Nostalgia can be a saddening thing . . . John Barrymore was unquestionably one of the most famous stage and screen actors of this century; his Hamlet is often hailed as the greatest interpretation of all time, and the famous profile and voice were known to hundreds of millions of fans around the world. But this is 1983 ... So much for fame. Happy New Year anyway!" — TK

'RODSERLING’S

MAGAZff^

S. Edward. Orensteir

Chairman and Executive Publisher Milton j. Cuevas

President and Publisher Sidney Z. Gellmaii

Treasurer

Associate Publisher anc Consulting Editor: Caro'. Serling Executive Editor: j'ohr. R. Bensink

Editor ii. Chief T.E.E . Kieir.

Managing Editor; RoberL Saba': Assistan: Editor; Alai. Rodgers Books Editor; Thomas iV. Disef. Contributing Editors: (jahar. Wilson, James Verniert, Ron GoularL

Design. Director; Michae. Monte Ari Director; Pat E. McQueer.

Art Production: Florencs Nea), Ljiljana Randjic-Coleman, Susan Lindeman Typography: Irma Landazurf

Production Director:

Stephen J. Fallon

Vice President-Finance, Controller: Thomas Schiff

Assistant Controller: Chris Grossman Assistant to the President: Jill Obernier Assistant to the Publisher; Judy Linden Publi» Relations Director:

Jeffrey Nickora

Special Projects Mgr.: Brian Orenstein Accounting Ass't: Annmarie Pistilli Office Assistant: Linda Jarit Traffic: Ray Bermudez

Circulation Mgr.: Carole A. Harley Circulation Ass't.: Stephen Faulkner Midwest Circ. Mgr.; Richard Tejan Western Circ. Mgr.; Dominick LaGatta

Advertising Coordinator:

Marina Despotakis

Advertising Ass't.: Karen Martorano

Rod Scrling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, (Issn ff 0279-6090) Marcb-April, 1984, Volume 4, Number 1, is published bimonthly (6 times per year) in the United States and simultaneously in Canada by TZ Publications, a division of Montcalm Publishing Corporation, 800 Second Avenue. New York, N.Y. 10017. Telephone (212) 986-9600. Copyri^t © 1984 by TZ Publications. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine is published pursuant to a license from Carolyn Serling and Viacom Enterprises, a division of Viacom International, Inc. All rights reserved. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Return postage must accompany all unsolicited material. The publisher assumes no responsibility for care and return of unsolicited materials. All rights reserved on material accepted for publication unless otherwise specified. All letters sent to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine or to its editors are assumed intended for publication. Noth- ing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publishers. Any similarity between « persons appearii^ and real persons living or dead

is coincidental. Sin^l^opies $2.50 in U.S., $3 in Canada. Subscriptions: U.S. and U.S. possessions $16, Canada and foreign $19. Foreign subscriptions must be paid in U.S. currency, except Canada. ABC membership applied for and pending. Postmaster: Send address changes to Rod Serli^s The Twilight Zone Magazine, P.O. Box 252, Mt. Morris, IL 61054-02S2. Printed in U.S.A.

Twilight Zone 7

A Note

from tlie Publislicr...

This issue of Twilight Zone marks our third anniversary, and we're proud to present the winners of our Third Annual Short Story Contest. To Jon Cohen, Pamela J. Jesaen, Bertram W. G. Doyle, and E, Walter Suba, Jr., our heartiest congratulations.

Twilight Zone stories have sometimes been called electronic-age campfire tales, folklore for the high-tech generation, or simply "metaphysical hoodwinks." As for these 1984 versions, we'll let you be the judge — although I'd wager you'll find yourself journeying once again into that familiar inner space where mankind's primal fears, hopes, dreams, and nightmares lie. Hopefully, though, you'll also find in these new stories some of the same caring, concern, and commitment that we did — qualities that were such a crucial part of the tv series. There's no question in my mind that these unusual odysseys are of, in, and about that other dimension.

To that end, we thought it would be fun to follow up on reader Richard Knox's suggestion and find out which episodes from the tv series the rest of you found the most memorable. The results are in, and the choices you've made are as varied as the series itself was: stories of lost identity and the eternal search for self . . . dread of the unknown, fear of the future and death . . . nuclear holocaust and the destruction of human freedom. But stories, too, of the dignity of man, his treatment of his fellows and his common yearnings ... his need for commitment and the importance of love . . . and, appropriately, stories of crazy, unruly machines . . . masterpiece studies of fear and terror, and even a "shaggy saucer story."

In commenting about the series some years ago. Rod said, "We had some real turkeys, some fair ones, and some shows I'm really proud to have been a part of." My feeling is that the program was at its best when it went beyond pure entertainment and dealt with timely issues and ideas, giving a gentle prod to the viewer and making him think. If there is a lingering message to be found in The Twilight Zone, it is a reminder of man's inhumanity to man — and a warning that the crime of the century is a lack of caring and the loss of our capacity for outrage.

Here are the results of the Reader's Poll:

1. "Eye of the Beholder" (a runaway favorite)

2. "Time Enough at Last"

3. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

4. "To Serve Man"

5. "Night of the Meek"

6. "It's a Good Life"

7. "Walking Distance"

8. "A Stop at Willoughby"

9. "The Invaders"

10. "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"

11. "Living Doll"

12. "Five Characters in Search of an Exit"

13. "The After Hours"

14. "Kick the Can"

15. "The Obsolete Man"

16. "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim"

17. "A World of His Own"

18. "And When the Sky Was Opened"

19. "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"

20. "Death's Head Revisited"

"Nothing in the Dark" (tie)

We've published fourteen of the above list in this magazine to date, and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is coming next. All three segments featured in Twilight Zone — The Movie made the top twenty. In general, your choices matched the straw poll that we ran in the office and also agreed with our in-house expert, Marc Scott Zicree. I don't have to tell you which are my favorites — you've been reading them all along in the magazine! (It's nice to have creative control.) I was surprised at a couple of episodes that didn't make the list, but you've made our job easy now; we know which teleplays to publish next. Thanks to all for your cooperation.

In any event ... do enjoy this Third Anniversary Issue, where, as it is said, "the improbable is made possible and the impossible is made probable."

Associate Publisher

8 Twilight Zone

Illustration © 1983 Thomas M. DIsch

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The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis (Random House, $13.95) is an inspirational novel for intellectuals.

It concerns the ever-more-succejsful career of Beth Harmon, from her early days in the Methuen Home orphanage, an institution as garishly oppressive as Dotheboys Hall in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, to her still-youthful triumph over the Russian grandmaster of chess, Vasily Borgov. The vicarious satisfaction of following Ms. Harmon's ascent to chess greatness, on the wings of her own (largely unassisted) genius, can be savored equally by readers with a passion for the game and by those like myself who would sooner play Scrabble or Othello. Only a knowledgeable chessplayer (Tevis's jacket copy says he is a class C player, which must be good enough to brag about!) could have depicted the heroine's growing mastery of the game in such persuasive detail, but only an artist could have informed that detail with drama so unfailingly compelling. Chess, by virtue of its involuted intricacy, is an interesting game but not a likely subject for dramatic treatment, yet The Queen's Gambit is one of those books that will make you put the rest of your life on hold until you've reached the last page, and it does this without lever embroidering its basic theme with extraneous melodrama.

That theme is self-mastery under conditions of extreme adversity. Beth's first adversary is the orphanage, where her youthful genius, though discovered, is ignored, and where she is addicted, at the age of eight, to the use of tranquilizers. (The novel begins

D I M E N S I O

BcMks

by Thomas M. Disch

in the fifties, when Librium was almost as common as fluoridated water.) Beth's potential for drug dependency acts as a Damoclean sword, ready to come, crashing down at any moment of crisis. When she grows older, the problem is compounded by a proclivity for alchoholic bingeing. Tevis's depiction of Beth's delicate balance between youthful fame and incipient self- destruction is all the more convincing because she never steps out of character. As one might expect of a chess prodigy (and an alumna of Methuen Home), Beth runs a low emotional temperature. She negotiates the various crises of her life carefully and usually with success, but her only passion is for chess. When she gets a chance to join her high school's "elite Apple Pi" sorority (after becoming a national celebrity), she experiences an astonishment of boredom and taxis home early to read The Middle Game in Chess.

Later she arranges her sexual defloration in much the same spirit one might take a driving exam.

The book's best coup de theatre is Beth's relationship with her adoptive mother, Mrs. Wheatley, whose transformation, under Beth's relentless pressure, from a morose slattern into her adoptive daughter's agent is the stuff that Academy Awards are made of. (Two of Tevis's earlier novels became classic movies; The Hustler, with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason dueling with pool cues; and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Another sf novel.

Mockingbird, is said to be in production.)

While The Queen's Gambit is not in any sense science-fictional, its appeal is similar to that of such sf classics as More than Human or Flowers for Algernon, both effective wish-fulfillment fantasies for those whose organ-of-preference is the brain. Intellectuals rarely get a chance to read inspirational novels — leastways, not ones that cater to their daydreams. Jocks have Rocky and housewives have Silhouette Romances, fictional fare tailored

for the specific purpose of ego reinforcement and the better morale of the troops. But intellectuals — that is, people determined to be bright and knowledgeable — are generally expected to read books that will make them worry more. Books that can do this are accounted Serious Literature; those that can't, or choose not to, aren't. So, though The Queen's Gambit won't enhance your reputation for Seriousness, it's a delightful book, and a guaranteed antidote to the blues, the blahs, and many forms of non-chronic depression. However, if such troubles persist, you're advised to see a physician.

Or — if you do want to enhance your reputation for Seriousness, and you believe in literature's homeopathic powers — then you might read The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka (Schocken, $22.50). Kafka is the king of worriers, the Lord Apollo of the Age of Anxiety. From the late forties through the early sixties, Kafka's reputation in this country was such that his name, in its adjectival form, "Kafkaesque," became synonomous with anything that is scary and slightly skewed, rather the way that the Twilight Zone theme is used nowadays.

Virtually all Kafka's stories have an element of fantasy, or at least of radical strangeness, but Kafka's fantasies bear little resemblance to what is traditionally offered to readers of genre fantasy. This is not simply because; of the darker emotional coloring of much of his work, but because Kafka had little use for conventional supernatural trappings (except in some of the fifty- five extremely short pieces that fill out the last si:<th of this very hefty collection) or for conventional notions of narrative strategy.

Kafka's stories are dreamlike in an almost definitive sense. That's to say, he has, as much as Freud, shaped our intellectual conception of the dreaming process. Reading his best work is like walking into the labyrinth of the subconscious— but

10 Twilight Zone

without the reassurance of some precautionary Ariadnei's-thread of rationality, such as psychoanalytic theory provides. Kafka, like such Symbolist poets as Mallarme, created allegorical systems that have no key. There could be no better testimony to his success at resisting interpretation than the immense wasteland of criticism devoted to that purpose. Kafka's worlds are as unmappable as those in our dreams, and within their shifting terrains his characters enjoy a strange autonomy.

For these and other reasons Kafka probably creates more anxiety among his readers than any other author; not the vicarious chills and thrills of narrative suspense that conventional "spine-tinglers" aim at, but genuine distress. As a result, he is probably more deferred to than read, even by those who drop his name from time to time. Instead of being one of the highest hurdles on the track to being hip, he has been relegated to the status of an Honored Classic, whom one may have to read in college but, with luck, never again:

"Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'? Isn't that the one about the guy who wakes up and discovers he's a cockroach? I think I've got my Cliff Notes somewhere."

If that has been your take on Kafka, let me urge you to give him another chance and dip into some of the less famous tales from The Complete Stories. A personal favorite of my own is the autobiographical animal fable, "Investigations of a Dog," which is told in the first person by an older dog, who recollects the frolics of his youth from the philosophic vantage of maturity. Kafka's dog narrator is unfailingly canine (I've known a golden retriever with much the same basic disposition), but here is such a dog as could only exist in Kafka's world, where (the reader slowly learns) the people who care for and feed these dogs are all invisible, apprehended only as a kind of music. Thus, Kafka's dogs in their relation to their unseen masters are analogous to men in their relation to the gods in their more providential aspects:

. . . the essence of all knowledge Is enough for me, the simple rule with which the mother weans her young ones from her teats and sends them into the world: 'Water the ground as much as you can.' And in this sentence is not almost everything contained? What has scientific inquiry, ever since our first fathers inaugurated it, of decisive imporfance to add to this? Mere details, . , . but this rule will remain as long as we are dogs. It concerns our main staple of food .... this food we find on fhe earth, but the earth needs our water to nourish it and only at that price provides us with our food, the emergence of which . . . can also be hastened by certain spells, songs, and ritual movements ....

As with the other most notable creator of dream worlds, Lewis Carroll, the signature quality of Kafka's work is its diffident — and at times dithering — handling of What- Can't-Be not simply as What-Is (all fantasy must do that) but as What-Is- Taken-For^Granted. He imagines a man metamorphosed into a giant

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worrying whether he can get to the office on time.

For sf writers with New Wave affinities, Kafka has been a major source of inspiration and touchstone of excellence. Indeed, Rudy Rucker, who may lay claim to being the last of the New Wave generation (though he would probably not want to) entitled his own (very good) first collection of short fiction The 57th Franz Kafka; as if to say, "Yes, we all follow in those footsteps."

Well, perhaps not quite all — not on the evidence of Charles Grant's anthology of original (fourteen) and reprinted (six) short stories, lamely titled The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror (Dodd, Mead, $15.95). This is not to slight the merits of the collection, which vary, necessarily, from tale to tale but which racks up ^ a pretty good total score; it is shnply to note that "dark fantasy" (Grant's high-toned euphemism for "horror stories"; thus undertakers become - "grief counselors" and garbagemen "sanitary engineers") is a traditional rather than an experimental or innovative art form.

There are undeniable advantages to playing the game by the rules. Geniuses may fly in the face of tradition, but when their epigones attempt to follow them, the result is likely to lack both the strength of conventional post-and-lintel construction or the energy of first defiance. Traditional values in fiction (a strong plot, believable characters, flowing prose) are a safeguard against major debacle in much the way that wearing evening clothes protects one against sartorial solecisms. They offer, as do the sonnet and the sonata form, the aesthetic satisfaction of tight closure. But the chief virtue of a traditional narrative, for most readers, is surely that it is comfortable, like a couch one has lived with many years and that has learned the shape of one's head. Since horror stories must deal with subjects that are inherently disquieting, this observance of aesthetic decorums ("Once upon a time . . . ") helps defuse — or at least distance — feelings that could be genuinely dangerous, if given a less circumscribed expression.

Is all this just a roundabout way of saying that The Dodd, Mead

Gallery of Horror is $15.95 worth of the mixture-as-before? Partly, but it's also to say that some of its contents have been compounded very well; none more so than the lead story, William F. Nolan's "Something Nasty," a horror story about why people want to tell horror stories. Nolan deserves some kind of trophy (the head of a rat, perhaps, stuffed and mounted) for having carved such a fine little netsuke of nastiness.

With Nolan establishing the "A" position of a grading scale, then there are at least three B-pluses to be singled out (not surprisingly, they are reprints): Theodore Sturgeon's "Talent"; "Down Among the Dead Men" by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann; and "Petey" by Twilight Zone's own T.E.D. Klein. At the other end of the scale there are fewer decomposed lemons than one would be likely to find in other recent genre anthologies (since there has been a booming sellers' market in horror fiction of late). Three of these lemons rate D's: "The Sunshine Club" by the usually reliable Ramsey Campbell, here free-associating with a notable lack of narrative steam; "The Typewriter" by David Morrell, an E.C. Comics plot told with leaden humor; and (worse than either of those) "Death to the Easter Bunny!" by Alan Ryan, who sets out to sinisterize Easter Bunny lore and fails, and then, to compound the failure, tries to pretend he was only joking, which he wasn't, not for a comma. Ryan deserves a bag of killer tomatoes for this one.

And that leaves Eric Van Lustbader, whose thirty-page novelette, "In Darkness, Angels," merits such a monumental F that it almost flips round the axis of the scoring scale, as hyperbolas do, and achieves greatness. For some time already Lustbader has enjoyed a cult status among connoisseurs of the sublimely awful. His bestselling novels are written in a prose style that relieves critics of any need to write reviews: they need only quote. Lustbader has a knack for the mot injuste and the perfect placement of the most ringing cliches that not even Stephen Donaldson can rival. (Indeed, Donaldson scores at least a B-minus for his contribution to this volume, an overwritten but honestly felt tale of conjugal lunacy.) Here, for instance, is’ how Lustbader begins his story:

If I had known then what I know now.

How those v^ords echo on and on inside my mind, iike a rubber boli bouncing down an endiess staircase. As if they had a iite of their own. Which, i suppose, they do now.

i cannot sieep, but is it any wonder? Outside, biue-white iightning forks iike a giant's jagged ciaw and the thunder is so ioud at times that i feei i must be trapped inside an immense beii, reverberations like memory unspooiing in a reckless helix, making a mess at my feet.

If I had known then what I know now. And yet , . , ,

Lustbader's dramatic organization and sense of character are of a piece with his verbal wizardry. He takes aim with a cannon for the bam door of the Lowest Common Denominator and then, as in a Buster Keaton movie, he hits a tree in a neighbor's field. Here his narrator portrays the moment when he is falling in love with a vampire's beautiful sister:

. , . Ten thousand tiny leaves moved minutely in the soft breeze as if I were watchinQi a distant crowd fluttering lifted handkerchiefs at the arrival of some visiting emperor. A kind of dreamy warmth stole over me and at once my unerasiness was gone.

“Yes," I told her. "It Is peaceful here."

"I am glad," she said, "You feel it too. Perhaps that is because you are a writer. A writer feels things more deeply, is that not so?"

I smiled. "Maybe some, yes. We're always creating characters for our stories so we have to be adept at pulling apart the people we meet . . . . "

There was a singer once, Florence Foster Jenkins, who had a similar way with her art. Her ear was purest tin, her voice of msty iron; she had impeccably bad taste— and the highest opinion of her own artistry. Being a woman of means, every year she rented Camegit: Hall and gave an invitation-only concert. Tickets to those concerts were scalped for huge prices, and the records made of the sounds she produced are still available from RCA all these decades later. Reading Lustbader's "In Darkness, Angels" is like hearing Florence Foster Jenkins perform Vissi d'arte — an unfc'rgettable and incomparable experience. 19

12 Twilight Zone

Illustration © 1983 Gahan Wilson

Three perfectly all right items this time. One is an entirely unpretentious aliens-on-Earth film which works quite nicely within its purposely limited terms; the second is very pretentious, but pulls off some really spectacular effects on its wobbling way to disaster; and the third is an odd super-spectacular which is only allowable in this column if you look upon this universe as the late Buckminster Fuller did, viewing it as a nonsimultaneous scenario — which I certainly hope you do, dear readers.

Let us start with the lightest, least demanding, and in its modest way, best of the lot: Strange Invaders, which is the second collaboration between director-writer Michael Laughlin and writer William Condon. Messrs. Laughlin and Condon's aim is merely to produce an entertaining and divertingly spooky movie. I liked their first effort. Strange Behavior, for much the same reasons. They enjoy adding wry bits of humor here and there, and more often than not, the bits work. Finally, they have a good feel for the foibles of our American way of life, framing their monsters and weird doings very cleverly within it.

Behavior was located entirely in a smallish town, the sort Hitchcock loved to explore in his Afherican

Gothic offerings, and it rendered quite touchingly the confusion of the simple townfolk as they found themselves confronted with an almost European-style villainy. (Actually, the fiend turned out to be one of their own, but he had traveled far and picked up fancy ways.)

In Invaders, the scene of the action is considerably expanded; it includes not only the boonies but evil old New York as well. Thi^ allows much humorous comment on the provincialism of the big city as well as of small towns, and on their dread- filled apprehensions of one another.

One of the film's funniest running gags (and there are many) takes off from this premise of societal contrasts. The aliens have occupied a dinky Midwestern town back in the 1950s, turning themselves into look- alikes of the town's original inhabitants. Twenty-five years later events force the aliens to travel to New York City (they travel economically, via bus) where, being aliens, it never crosses their minds that to any New Yorker a small-town Midwesterner — and certainly a small- town Midwesterner garbed in clothes that were fashionable twenty-five years ago — will look alien. It's a very funny effect.

The cast for Invaders was lovingly assembled, and I can't think

how it could have been improved upon. Best is Nancy Allen as a sort of Carole Lombard type who, as a hack reporter for a particularly obscure, tacky expos^type newspaper, stirs up trouble when she runs a routine ALIENS ARE AMONG US piece with, inadvertently, a photograph of one of our actual aliens. She is a wacky delight. Paul LeMat, the Melvin of Melvin and Howard, is just right as a professor of bugs at a big New York university who, all unknowingly, has become betrothed to a female alien. Then we have Kenneth Tobey doing a swell job as a Midwestern alien who doesn't like dogs, and Michael Lemer, who has left off playing historical types such as Pierre Salinger, portraying a simple tourist who, after viewing his whole family wither into ghastly pink slugs which in turn change into floating globs of blue, spends a good long stretch at the Funny Farm.

One excellent performance is that of Louise Fletcher as Mrs. Benjamin, the harried head of a very mysterious, paranoid-style government outfit which keeps nervous track of weird presences on our planet (the jittery implication is that there are quite a few of them), including the Midwestern aliens. Fletcher makes, a few bad guesses

OTHER DIM

Screen

by Gahan Wilson

"We all cheered at the end. ” Allens-in-dlsguise Kenneth Tobey (late of The Thing) and Diana Scarwid clash in the rousing conclusion of Strange Invaders, just as their saucer is about to take off.

14 Twilight Zone

"Extraordinary gadgetry ..." Lcxjise Fletcher ploys o scientist in Brainstorm who, at the moment of her death, manages to record the experience on the machine she helped invent.

now and then; she muffs it when LeMat and Allen flee New York via Amtrak and thus easily slip through her blockade, herself having earlier declared, "Nobody takes the train these days!" Still, so far, at least, she and her shadowy organization have managed, one way or another, to keep our planet from being destroyed by strangers.

The more peculiar actions of the aliens, including some gross and slurpy transformations (you wouldn't believe what an alien does to itself when it gets hot and uncomfortable in its room at the New York Hilton!), are ably handled by what is billed as The Alien Effects Unit, which also shrinks some poor innocent little kid into a wonderfully repulsive,wrinkly, gicky-poo mess. Well done.

Though it does take place mostly in the 1980s, Invaders is very much of the fifties in mood, premise, and even in color; the blues and reds and odd greens very much suggest the oddish hues you'd see in movies of that time. Of course, it's all gently satirized and full of put-ons of the period, but the plot, characters, and certainly the wrap-ups play the fifties game affectionately. The folks in the theater, myself included, had a fine time of it, and we all cheered at the end.

Our next review must unfortunately be a little more lacking in enthusiasm. Even though Brainstorm has some excellent stuff in it, it is not, as its slogan in the ads asks you to believe, "The Ultimate Experience." Or at least I hope not.

Brainstorm is, in its essence, exactly the same in structure, milieu, and basic intent as Altered States. If you saw the first, there is no way in the world you can avoid comparing it to the second in all the above categories — and unfortunately for Brainstorm, it comes away the loser in every one of them.

Take its attempt to create the mood of the academic/scientific world. Thanks to Paddy Chayevsky and his magic ear, the dialogue of the researchers in States had just the right ring; the enthusiastic overlapping conversations sounded absolutely right. In Brainstorm, however, the script by Robert Stitzel and Philip Frank Messina just does not get it; the chatter between the scientists is far too slow, too simple. If you listen to technicians excitedly conversing about their discipline, especially a

discipline you are not equally expert in, it is generally impossible to follow them. You catch flashes, glimmerings, but they're always dancing ahead of you. That's the kind of dialogue you got in States; you don't in Brainstorm.

Again, the actors in States all had a scientist's alertness about them, an impatient brightness, and an almost angry eagerness to understand. Not in Brainstorm. Here, with the occasional exception of Louise Fletcher (hi there again, Louise!), there's no indication that they're really relating to the extraordinary gadgetry around them.

Christopher Walken, as the hero scientist, is particularly unfortunate in this regard. He has been excellent in many roles — I thought he was nigh perfect as the ice-cold professional soldier in Dogs of War — but he is completely unable to project the intellectual enthusiasm so characteristic of a really tumed-on scientist. The part demands someone absolutely frantic in the search for the truth, and it gets instead a cool, disinterested sort who, at best, when fooling around with the really extraordinary props in Brainstorm,

comes across as a mere technician rath^ than as an honest-to-God discoverer.

Natalie Wood, as his troubled wife, is also unconvincing as a scientist, and, unlike Walken, she doesn't ever evince any feel for the intricacies of the lab machinery stretching all about her. You suspect she wouldn't have a clue about how to use a soldering iron, though she'd mean well.

Louise Fletcher (hi!) does come across well sometimes, and I think that with better dialogue she could probably have been convincing. But she hasn't got better dialogue. Cliff Robertson, the scientific entrepreneur who coordinates the project, is good. He obviously knows how to play cagey power types, and it's clear that the authors of the script have a better handle on the sort of dialogue likely to come from the mouths of wheeler- dealers than of scientists.

The real lead in the picture is, of course, not a human at all, but a dingus which can record any event experienced by one human and can play that event to any other human.

I could record myself writing at this moment, and you could play me

Twilight Zone 15

SCREEN

back and know if I'm using a typewriter or a pencil. [It's a pencil, unfortunately. — Ed.]

The whoopie fun aspect of all this comes when we see the gadget transformed from a great big helmet with cooling cables until, after a number of stages, it becomes a handy little plastic Sony-type unit which can be mass-produced and clipped onto your head as lightly as a tennis sweatband. (The film is very good on such superficial aspects of the technology.) We see racing drivers recording themselves at high speed, and then see greying executives, safe at a conference table, wearing test versions of the gadget, swaying their torsos to allow for sharp curves taken at near two hundred m.p.h. And there's an excellent, completely automated production line where the final version of the gadget ends up being produced, thanks to naughty Cliff Robertson's selling out to the military. All this and much more besides is great fun. *

1 think the most effective scene in the film, though, it is the grimmest; it's when Fletcher dies of a heart attack, quite horribly and in great detail. I wonder whether anyone has sued the producers for inducing a similar attack. The thing is extraordinarily well done, and Fletcher's skilled writhings and crampings are so convincingly portrayed that afterward, during dinner, I noticed myself displaying

the teensiest, itsy-bitsyiest hypochondria regarding my chest region — though it probably had more to do with the lasagna.

The big schtick of Brainstorm is that Ms. Fletcher manages, in spite of feeling just awful, to record her demise, and the gadget continues to record her for some time after that. What, if anything, is recorded? Well, that's what Mr. Walken is determined to find out, in spite of Mr. Robertson and the government of the United States of America. (We must take it on trust, but it would seem that under his cool, disinterested exterior there beats the fiery heart of a modern-day Galileo.) I would love to tell you what he eventually finds, as it is so funny, but I do not wish to spoil this film for children. Suffice it to say that I hope sincerely that God has other plans for us. Myself, I would prefer the Long Island Expressway, or even the Los Angeles Freeway — which I suspect may have been the direct inspiration for the creators of Brainstorm.

Or maybe it was a Lava-lamp.

Do you suppose it could have been a Lava-lamp?

The last film must be viewed in an Einsteinian light to qualify for this column, since it's a science fiction genre film in all its aspects save one: it is history. It happened.

The rockets are special-effect rockets, the spacesuits are costumes, space itself is a visual effect, and

everybody in it but JFK and Eric Sevareid is played by an actor (which is a serious flaw, as the Sevareid part should by all rights have been an actor impersonating Walter Cronkite). And yet The Right Stuff more or less took place.

"More or less" because one of the outstanding aspects of the movie is its lack of believability. Its simplistic motivation and two- dimensional cfiaracters both tend to remind you of far too many science fiction efforts.

Are we supposed to buy these simple-minded heroes? Are we supposed to accept these buffoons presented as world leaders? Are the ninnies presented as NASA scientists to be accepted for a minute as flesh and blood, or are they only the comic walk-ons they appear to be?

Take The Right Stuff's portrait of Lyndon Baines Johnson as played by Donald Moffat, written and directed by Philip Kaufman, and supposedly based on a book by Tom Wolfe, which, if it's l:)ased accurately, would indicate Wolfe has somewhat lost his light touch. Now, 1 am not and never have been a fan of LBJ. Quite the contrary. Very much the contrary. Very very much the contrary. However, I confess I was shocked at the: grotesque crudeness with which he's mocked in this film.

I have never ever seen an ex- President, including Nixon, for God's sake, presenteci in such cartoon form in a work claiming to be — as The Right Stuff does — serious drama. I mean, this Johnson is so bad that you end up less offended at him than at his mocken.. For the first time in my life, I actually felt sorry for the bastard.

Then there are odd evasions, such as not referring to Wernher Von Braun by name. He is only "Chief Scientist" in the credits, but he looks and talks like Wernher, and he even quotes famous quotes from him. Maybe it's because they wanted to have this kooky Kraut running all the way through the picture so you wouldn't get confused.

And the jingoism— ah, the jingoism! It is a species of jingoism I have not encountered for many, many years. It is the sort you never hear these days. At least till now.

I really tfiink, all in all, I much prefer the science fiction movies which are fiction.

They're much less frightening. 10

"Presented In cartoon form ..." Donald Moffat plays a cantankerous Lyndon Johnson In The Right Stuff, which caricatures almost everyone but the astronauts themselves.

16 Twilight Zone

O T H . E R

O N S

“Crammed with action, violence, and foliage. " Silent screen star Frank Merrill portrayed the ape man in Tarzan the Tiger (1929), when men were men, women were victims, and gorillas looked like rugs.

l^stalgia

by Ron Goulart

Urban Tales of Tarzan

Every few Christmases, in the midst of gif tw rapping the latest electronic miracle or speculating on how far I can safely overdraw our checking account, I find m.yself thinking about Edgar Rice Burroughs. He and his most famous creation are not traditional Yuletide figures, but I recall him because, for a while during my adolescence, ERB and I exchanged greeting cards each year. The reason I admired him was simple; he had invented one of my favorite heroes— although I must admit I was a Tarzan fan several years before I had any idea there were novels about him by a fellow named Burroughs.

I first encountered the ape man at the movies. Burroughs created Tarzan back before World War I, and his jungle superman made his debut in the October 1912 issue of Munsey's All-Story pulp magazine. That initial novel, Tarzan of the Apes, found its way into hardcovers in 1914 (the publisher was a Chic.ago house with the melodious name of McClurg) and onto the screen, under the same title, in 1918. I myself came along in 1933. Since it took me a while to get acclimated, I didn't discover Tarzan until three or four years later.

The definitive Tarzan of the Talkies was Johnny Weissmuller. Not an actor but a record-breaking swimmer, Weismuller was in his late twenties when he first donned the loincloth for MGM's Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932. It's said that he beat out such other contenders for the role as Tom Tyler, Joel McCrea, Johnny Mack Brown, and Clark Gable.

(Gable as Tarzan presents endless possibilities for fantasizing. One pictures a moustached ape man declaring, "Frankly, Jane, I don't give a damn.") W. S. Van Dyke directed, and Maureen O'Sullivan was cast as Tarzan's mate. Van Dyke, by the way, also directed The Thin Man for MGM in 1934, meaning that he gave audiences two of the most famous movie couples of the decade, Tarzan and Jane and Nick and Nora Charles.

MGM's Tarzan was not the articulate, multilingual chap ERB had been writing about for the past two decades. Rather, he was a primitive hunk not much more versed in human speech than your average gorilla. "My lines read like a backward two-year-old talking to his nurse," Weissmuller later complained. You suspect, though, that the major reasons for making this screen ape man less than fluent were Weissmuller's slightly flutey voice and his evident inability to get conviction into any line of dialogue containing more than a half dozen words. But for swimming, fighting man and beast, rescuing Jane, and swinging through trees, you couldn't beat him.

I have never seen any of the screen incarnations of Tarzan that came before the Weissmuller version. But just the names of the actors who portrayed the ape man in silent and early sound days make up a fascinating list: Elmo Lincoln, Gene Foliar, Frank Merrill, James Pierce, and P. Dempsey Tabler. It would've been fun to be an autograph hunter in the 1920s and approach this latter actor. "Pardon me, but aren't you P. Dempsey Tabler?"

As I recall, the first Tarzan film I saw was Tarzan Escapes. The third in MGM's Weissmuller series, it was released in 1936. Unless my neighborhood cinema palace got it late, I was but three years old and no taller than a chimpanzee when 1 got my initial look at the jungle lord. By the early 1940s, after I had ingested Tarzan Finds a Son, Tarzan's Secret Treasure, Tarzan's New York Adventure, Tarzan Triumphs, and Tarzan's Desert Mystery, I was a

confirmed ape man addict. These movies, crammed with action, violence, and foliage, were vastly entertaining to me in those days. I remember sitting there in the musky matinee darkness, giggling and guffawing at the droll antics of Cheta the chimpanzee.

But there was more than entertainment involved; I had a strong desire to be Tarzan. Not only because it meant you could run around all day, climb trees or whatever, and never have to worry abouf getting your school clothes dirty or torn, but also because Weissmuller always seemed so damned competent. Very articulate he wasn't, but the guy could do anything with his hands: make a bow and arrow, skin a lion, catch a crocodile, do all sorts of nifty things with a knife and never once cut himself. (I couldn't even make a balsa wood airplane without slicing two fingers for every hunk of wood.)

But if I couldn't be Tarzan, the notion of having him as a relative was also appealing — as a father, the sort who was never too busy to take you on a picnic, or an uncle, maybe. Of course, I was what was known in those days as a finicky eater, and had my mother ever said, "Well, here's Uncle Tarzan with a fresh- killed antelope for dinner," I might have fled rather than jumped for joy.

I suppose I ought to say something about the supposed racism of these films, except that it wasn't something I was aware of at the time. To me the Africa of the 1930s and '40s Tarzan movies was a fantasyland no more based on reality than was Oz. It was a place with an

Twilight Zone 17

a

infinite number of out-of-the-way corners. Somebody was always losing an ancient city or a vanished civilization there. More strange cults could be fit into it than you were likely to find in all of Southern California. Yet, while frought with more than its share of large-scale dangers, Hollywood Africa seemed relatively free of some of the minor annoyances of everyday woodland life. Biting insects were infrequent, as were plants that caused skin rashes oi other allergic reactions. There must've been a lot of pollen floating around, too, but you rarely saw Tarzan sneeze.

Working my way toward ERB's original prose version of his ape man, I next encountered the jungle lord in the funny papers. Tarzan had come to the comic pages as a daily strip in 1929; a Sunday page was added in 1931. The dailies, for several years, were anonymous adaptions of the novels, and originally there were no lowbrow dialogue balloons or rowdy POW! sound effects to be seen. The copy, sedately set in type, ran below the pictures. Hal Foster, a seasoned advertising illustrator by then, drew the first sequences. Having little faith in comics and even less love for Tarzan, he soon dropped the project, and a far less gifted fellow named Rex Maxon took over the drawing of the daily and the Sunday. Burroughs, who'd originally wanted pulp illustrator J. Allen St. John for the job, never thought much of Maxon's rendering of his hero. Since the feature syndicate had the final say, though, all he could do was write grumbling letters to the syndicator. These may have had some effect, because Foster was eventually wooed back to do the Sunday page.

To me, no Prince Valiant admirer, Foster's Sunday Tarzans feature the best work he ever did. They're impressively and ambitiously drawn, yet have a loose and casual feel. Nothing daunted him, and Foster could draw ancient Egyptian civilizations surviving in contemporary Africa, Viking pirates, prehistoric monsters on the rampage, or even a foxhunt in rural England.

"For swimming, fighting, rescuing Jane, and swinging through trees, you couldn't beat him." Johnny Weissmuller was the screen’s best-known Tarzan. Left, poster from a 1942 adventure; above, publicity shot from Tarzan Finds a Son 0939), with Maureen O’Sullivan, Johnny Sheffield, and Cheta. (In the books, Tarzan’s simian pal is called Nkima.)

When he left the feature in the middle 1930s, he was replaced by Bume Hogarth.

Back in the thirties and forties I saved the Sunday pages and clipped the dailies, although I wasn't as diligent as I might have been; sometimes cutting and pasting seemed too much like a class project. Tarzan didn't appear in the paper we took (a second string Hearst sheet), but a kindly great aunt and uncle saved the comics out of their Oakland Tribune for me. We'd visit them at least once a month, and after hitting the candy dish I would descend into the cellar and gather up the latest pile. I doubt if I noticed Burroughs's name on the movie screen credits back then, so the first time I became aware of him must have been as the alleged author of the comic strip. In the late 1930s 1 discovered that the earlier Tarzan Sundays and dailies could be found reprinted in Tip Top Comics and Comics on Parade. I added those to my collection, along with the Big

Little Books' T.irzan novels. Those were small fat books that recycled the newspaper dailies, alternating a picture page w:ith a page of text.

They cost a dime and were three times as thick as a paperback novel.

Although Tarzan had been around in real novels since 1914, I didn't personally stumble upon them until the middle 1940s. One of the reasons for this was the fact that Edgar Rice Burroughs, like L. Frank Baum, was not highly thought of by the librarians of my youth, and I wasn't a huntei' of second-hand bookstores until a few years later.

One fateful day, however, while my mother was shopping in an Oakland department stoi-e, I wandered into the book section. There, almost hidden away on an obscure low shelf, was a row of ciuthentic Tarzan novels. The store had probably had them in stock for years. Tarzan and the Ant Men, The Beasts of Tarzan, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, and more, all

18 Twilight Zone

Weissmuller contemplates the void in Tarzan Escapes (1936).

written by the same man who signed his name to the comic strip. It was like looking into Chapman's Homer, taking a gander at the Elgin marbles, and discovering the Pacific Ocean all rolled into one. I knew I must read these books, each and evt'iy one of them. The major snag was that they cost eighty-five cents apiece, meaning 1 could only buy one this time. After considerable deliberation, I selected Tarzan and the Hidden Empire. I read it from cover to cover. It became the cornerstone ol my ERB library, and Burroughs one of my favorite writers. In my innocent early teens I firmly believed theit the three greatest writers ever were Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, and A. Merritt. I had yet to go through my Thomas Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, and F. Scott Fitzgerald phases.

As I began reading the novels, I realized that I was now confronted with a somewhat different Tarzan than I'd beeen seeing in the movies. This was not the “Ungawa . . . Boy eat ... Tarzan sleep now ' jungle man of the silver screen, but an ariticulate fellow who could speak several languages including French, English, and Ape. I took to him anyway. The comic strip had already demonstrated to me that Tarzan could be a brilliant conversationalist when need be. I was willing to accept him in several variations of his natural man persona — just so long as Burroughs kept the lost cities, cruel villains, lovely maidens, wild savages, and untamed beasts coming.

In preparing to do this article I reread some of the Tarzan novels. As with my revisiting of Sax Rohmer a couple of issues back, I found I was unable to recapture the feelings the books had originally given me three-

plus decades ago. Yet I didn't chortle over Burroughs, either. He often tended to write as though he were giving you the synopsis of a much larger work, so at least the stories are full of incident, suspense, and cliffhangers: not rich in detail, but not dull, either. I was also struck by how much his earliest novels sound like nineteenth-century fiction, especially nineteenth-century British fiction. We all know Burroughs read Kipling and Haggard, but it must not have stopped there. There's a strong Victorian flavor to novels like The Return of Tarzan, and indeed Lord Greystoke (the ape man's true title) is very much a typical Victorian hero. He is, to the core, a gentleman. And just as true gentlemen like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield survived in the urban jungle of nineteenth- century London, so Tarzan survived in the jungles of Africa and proved eventually that he, too, was a gentleman. You can never keep a gentleman, if he's honest and right- thinking, from rising to his true rank in society.

Another thing that appealed to me in the Tarzan novels of my youth was the fantasy element — the strange creatures who lurked in the lost cities, the journeys to places like the center of the Earth. Therefore I branched out and began consuming ERB's other works. I tracked down most of the John Carter of Mars novels (including the two Big Little Book yarns), read all the Carson of Venus series, and then tackled the Pellucidar books. Still a Burroughsophile in high school, I even persuaded one of my English teachers (his name, so help me, was Orville Sipe) to let me do a book (continued on page 80)

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Twilight Zone 19

TWILIGHT ZONE TRIVIA QUIZ

by Gary Frisch

With all the quizzes we've run in this column — quizzes on horror* movie heroes and fantasy kids, crosswords and acrostics and ? match-'em-ups — we thought it was high time for something a little closer to home: a quiz in honor of TZ's third anniversary ^ and the celebrated television series whose name we bear. ;; Submitted for your approval, a trivia quiz straight out of .. .

The Twilight Zone.

Answers on page 80.

II. DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Match the character with the episode in which he/ she appeared.

1. Helen Foley a. "The Hitch-Hiker"

2. Brother Jerome b. "Nightmare as a Child"

3. Janet Tyler c. "The Lonely"

4. Henry Bemis d. "The Whole Truth"

5. James Cony e. "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine"

6. Nan Adams f. "The Eye of the Beholder"

7. Barbara Jean Trenton g. "Time Enough at Last"

8. Pedott h. "A Thing About Machines"

9. Bartlett Finchley i. "The Howling Man"

10. Harvey Hunnicut j. "What You Need"

I. TITLE TURMOIL

Complete each of the following Twilight Zone titles.

1. "A Stop at "

2. "Nervous Man in a m "

3. "Long Live "

4. " Is Coming"

5. "The Trouble with "

6. " and the Graves"

7. "The Man"

8. "Showdown with "

9. " on Doomsday"

10. "The Last Night of a '

III. FACTS AND FIGURES

1. How many episodes of The Twi- light Zone were made?

2. How many episodes did Rod Serling pen?

3. Which episode was written by science fiction great Ray Bradbury?

4. What two companies supplied Rod Serling's wardrobe for The Twilight Zone!

5. Which of the following elements has never been seen in a Twilight Zone opening?

a. Einstein's Theory of Relativity

b. An hourglass

c. An eyeball

d. A window shattering

e. A clock

6. In which episode did Burt

Reynolds appear? Zone had only one character and

7. Name the pilot episode of the just one line of dialogue?

series. When did it air? 13. Which of the following entries

8. Name the final episode. When did cannot be found in The Twilight

it air? Zone file cabinet?

9. Which one of the following a. Baseball, under "B"

phrases did Rod Serling never say b. Superstition, under "S"

on The Twilight Zone! c. Mankind, under "M"

a. Submitted for your approval ... d. Ghost, under "G"

b. Witness if you will ... C- Phantom, under "P"

c. Consider for a moment . . ., 14. Name the episode in which the

d. File it under . . . characters can actually hear Rod

e. Case in point . . . Serling delivering his closing

10. How many episodes featured the narration.

spaceship from the movie 15. What show did Rod Serling host

Forbidden Planet! after The Twilight Zone!

11. In how many episodes did Robby 16. Name the two episodes that

the Robot, from the same movie, starred Ed Wynn.

appear? 17. Who composed the familiar theme

12. Which episode of The Twilight music for The Twilight Zone!

IV. ON THE SET

Match the following people with their behind-the-scenes jobs.

V. THE WRITERS

Match the following episodes with their writers.

1. Buck Houghton

2. William Tuttle

3. Virgil Beck

4. George T. Clemens

5. Bernard Herrmann

a. Makeup

b. Music

c. Producer

d. Director of Photography

e. Special Effects

1. "A Piano in the House"

2. "The Prime Mover"

3. "It's a Good Life"

4. "Little Girl Lost"

5. "A Game of Pool"

a. Rod Serling

b. Charles Beaumont

c. Richard Matheson

d. George Clayton Johnson

e. Earl Hamner, Jr.

VI. STAR STRUCK

Name the episode or episodes in which each of the follow- ing stars appeared.

1. Claude Akins

2. Orson Bean

3. Charles Bronson

4. Art Carney

5. James Coburn

6. Robert Duvall

7. Peter Falk

8. Buster Keaton

9. Jack Klugman

10. Lee Marvin

11. . Kevin McCarthy

12. Burgess Meredith

13. Agnes Moorehead

14. Billy Mumy

15. Robert Redford

16. William Shatner

17. Jack Warden

18. Dennis Weaver

19. Fritz Weaver

VII. BITS AND PIECES

1. Name Martin Sloan's hometown in "Walking Eiistance."

2. What name does the devil go ‘ under in "Escape Clause"?

3. In "Perchance to Dream," name the woman Edward Hall has nightmares about.

4. Name the ship that faces doom on "Judgment Night."

5. Name the thrive people Arch Hammer impersonates in "The Four of Us Are Dying."

6. Who is "Old Leadbottom"?

7. In "The After Hours," what item is Marsha White looking for in the department store? ,

8. Name the last-place ball club featured in "The Mighty Casey."

9. In what town are the newlyweds stranded in "Nick of Time"? '

10. In "The Whole Truth," who does Harvey Hunnicut finally unload the haunted car on?

11. Name the gangster Ace Larsen gambles with in "The Prime Mover."

12. In the episode "Two," what is the only word out of the woman's mouth?

13. In "Death's Head Revisited," what do the Dachau victims sentence Captain Lutze to for his crimes?

14. In "The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms," who are the three soldiers to relive Custer's Last Stand?

15. In "Stopover in a Quiet Town," what "town" do Bob and Millie * Frazier wake up in?

16. In "I Am the Night — Color Me Black," what is the cause of the eerie darkness?

VIII. AND NOW A WORD FROM ROD SERLING

In which episodes did

Rod Serling say the

following lines in his

narration?

1. "They say a dream takes only a second or so, and

* yet in that second a man can live a lifetime."

2. "Portrait of a man who thinks and thereby gets things done."

3. "The best laid plans of mice and men ..."

4. "Uniquely American institution known as the neighborhood bar."

5. "The word that Mrs. Bronson is unable to put into the hot, still, sodden air is 'doomed.'"

. 6. "Practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature and a combination of improb- able events."

7. "This is the face of terror."

8. "As must be obvious, this is a house hovered over by Mr. Death."

9. "Travelers to unknown regions would be well- advised to take along the family dog."

Courtesy Frar^k D. Harden

D

M

N

THE LIGHTHOUSE’ REVISITED

Back in August 1982 we ran a bizarre little piece called "The Lighthouse," Robert Bloch's completion of a story fragment from the papers of Edgar Allan Poe. Now, inspired by this "posthumous collaboration," another modern-day writer, Richard A. Lloyd, has tried his own hand at completing the fragment and has adapted it for the stage. The Lighthouse had its premiere late last fall at a student-run theater at Rutgers. Right, the striking poster by Debs Lloyd.

Ccbom

ptiAi/rJA

OTHER

Etc. Etc.

READERS’ POLL

Thanks to all our readers who wrote in naming their five favorite Twilight Zone episodes in response to our December '83 poll. The shows, in order of preference, are listed in Carol Serling's column on page 8.

Some readers provided reasons for their particular selections. "1 went with those that held up the best to repeated viewings," wrote Greg Cox of Kent, Washington, "strong dramatic stuff, as opposed to one-shot shock endings like 'Eye of the Beholder' or 'The Aftej * Hours.' D.avid C. Duncan of Columbia, Tennessee, punningly singled out "The Invaders" because of the "colossal performance by the late Agnes Moorehead."

Wrote Howard Baldwin of Palo Alto, California: "The very best TZ ever filmed was 'Long Live Walter Jameson,' because it had three seminal elements of the series. The first was immortality; death and the cheating of death and the avoidance of growing old ran deep in the series. In fact, most

of the others on my first tally involved those themes — 'Walking Distance,' 'Escape Clause,' 'Night Call,' 'Nothing in the Dark.' At the same time, Walter Jameson engages in a sort of time travel, a theme that appeared in two other favorites, 'Back There' and 'The Odyssey of Flight 33.' Finally, the show has the perfectly believable twist ending."

Bill Lefelvre of Port Colborne, Ontario, explained why he'd selected "A Stop at Willoughby": "I remember watching that episode and pleading with Gart Williams to get off the train when it stopped at Willoughby the second time. I was actually yelling at the tv, 'Get off! Get off!' I was afraid that the show was going to be a lesson about missed opportunities, and I would have been so upset if he hadn't gotten off the train when he had the chance."

Vernon Belcome of Houghton, Michigan, went further and listed his least favorite episodes; "All 'mirror' episodes, almost all hour-long episodes, 'The After Hours,' 'Black

Leather Jackets,' and 'Come Wander with Me.'"

Many readers found the choice a hard one. "It is an impossible feat, " wrote Bill J. Banks of Bellflower, California. "1 tried to list my five favorite shows, but when the list of twenty-five or so couldn't be narrowed any further, I gave up." Barry 1. Grauman of Long Branch, New Jersey, listed five shows (starting with "Walking Distance"), but added: "There is also a sublist of 129 'cherished' shows — not counting the hours, since I haven't seen them since I was a toddler."

Wrote read«;r Robert Burroughs of his list: "There are at least twenty more episodes that 1 enjoy just as much. In fact, there is not one bad' episode in the whole series. That's why it's become such a classic." He had kind words for Twilight Zone — The Movie, and added: "I only wish that Rod could be alive to see how much joy he is still bringing to millions of people who are just discovering The Twilight Zone for the first time."

‘ICEMAN’ COMETH

When we ran a preview two issues back of the new sf film Iceman, about a prehistoric man discovered frozen but alive in the Arctic icefields, we h^d no idea that we were walking, so to speak, on thin ice— until we got a letter from a Mr. Frank D. Hansen of Rollingstone,

Minnesota, who describes himself as "curator of the world- famous Homo pongoides (i.e. apelike man), more commonly known as the Minnesota Iceman or the Mysterious Creature in Ice." Hansen contends that it was his creature — which he calls "the most talked about, the most written about, and the most controversial discovery of our time" — that inspired the movie: "It is obvious that the script was written to 'cash in' on the worldwide publicity and notoriety already created by this unusual specimen."

The creature itself is six feet long, hairy, and— shades of The Thing! — encased in a block of ice. Hansen has exhibited it at shopping centers throughout the U.S. and Canada (at fifty cents a view) on behalf of its real owner, whom he describes as "a very well-known Hollywood personality." He enclosed a color photo of it (left), as well as a 1981 clipping from the Washington Post, whose reporter noted "a distinct smell of decay" above the creature's ice-filled coffin.

Since, according to Hansen, the owner refuses to let scientists remove the creature from the ice for analysis, it's hard to know just how seriously to take all this, except to ■ say that, judging from what we can see of the creature's face, we wouldn't care to meet its living relatives on a dark night in Siberia.

22 Twilight Zone

Copyright © 1983 by Maxim Jakubowski and Malcolm Edwards. AB rights reserved,

KA-ZAR, KI-GOR, AND COMPANY

As the Wallechinskys showed— and, come to think of it, Esquire before them — all the world loves a list, and sf/fantasy fans are presumably no exception. For those among you intrigued by items such as "Ten SF Writers Who Have Appeared in Movies," "Fifteen Nobel Prizewinners Who Have Written Science Fiction and Fantasy," and "Fifteen Stories of Sex Between Humans and Robots," two Brits, Maxim Jakubowski and Malcolm Edwards, have compiled The SF Book of Lists (Berkley, $7.95), nearly four hundred pages of similarly vital information. Not all the lists are terribly interesting (e.g. the endless catalogue of Hugo and Nebula -winners), and there are the inevitable errors ("Zootiriique" for Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique," "By His Footsteps" for Robert A. Ffeinlein’s "By His Bootstraps"), but many of the lists are good frivolous fun and, for those of us here in Manhattan, make terrific elevator reading. Two examples, the first in honor of Ron Goulart's column on page 17:

Favorite Pulp Titles

Ghouls of the Green Death (Wyatt Blassingame, 1934)

Death Calls from the Madhouse (Hugh B. Cave, 1935)

The House of Doomed Brides (Ray Cummings, 1935)

The Chair Where Terror Sat (Arthur J. Burks, 1936)

Moaning on the Stjx (Arthur J. Burks, 1938)

Dance of the Blood Drinkers (J. O. Quinliven, 1938)

Black Pool for Hell Maidens (Hal K. Wells, 1938)

Slave of the Swamp Satan (Dale Clark, 1938)

Nameless Brides of Forbidden City (Frederick C. Davis, 1939)

Pawn of Hideous Desire (Ray Cummings, 1939)

When the Death-Bat Flies (Norvell W. Page, 1937)

Mistress of the Murder Madmen (Vernon James, 1939)

Death's Lips are Hot (Nathan Schachner, 1938)

The Goddess of Crawling Horrors (Wyatt Blassingame, 1937)

Food for the Fungus Lady (Ralston Fields, 1939)

Coming of the Faceless Killers The Wind Monster Wants Me

(Francis James, 1933) (Gabriel Wilson, 1938)

SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND DEPT.

Last issue we ran a letter from reader Alan Palmer asking if anyone could identify the big-band music used in the opening scenes of the Twilight Zone episode "Where Is Everybody?"

Reader Jim Doherty of Chicago has already come up with the answer — thanks to his work on an article about Twilight Zone composer Bernard Herrmann. "In my research," writes Doherty, "I obtained cue sheets from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for the episodes I was going to discuss.

Cue sheets are listings of every piece of music used in a particular film or television show, including composers' names and timings for each music cue used.

"According to the cue sheet for 'Where Is Everybody?', the big-band piece is entitled 'Turkish Delight,' written by Eric Cook. Another section of this piece was also used in a later episode, 'The Lonely,' as the record playing on Jack Warden's phonograph."

Now we ask you: could even the Playboy Advisor have come up with a better, faster, or more accurate answer than that?

QUOTE

"It is a perfectly ordinary Monday morning in October. Richard Lewis is on his way to work at Colonial Homes magazine. He enters the IND subway station at Bergen Street in Brooklyn. Richard Lewis doesn't know it, but he has just slipped from the world of the living into the Twilight Zone."

Opening of a hitherto unknown Twilight Zone episode? No, it's Georgia Dullea in the New York Times, with another horrifying tale of the New York transit system.

HISTORIC ENCOUNTER

No photographer was on hand to record the moment when Peter Cannon interviewed the great American horror " writer H. P. Lovecraft in his Providence home for last August's TZ — though that's hardly surprising, considering that Lovecraft died in 1937 and Cannon wasn't born till 1951. (As we noted then, the interview was compiled

from Lovecraft's letters.) But if the encounter could not be preserved, it can still be imagined — and now it has been, thanks to Rhode Island artist Jason Eckhardt ("Something About Cats," TZ August '82), who currently resides in a house where Lovecraft lived and who has clearly been touched by his spirit.

Twilight Zone 23

Thanks to Kathleen Murray

t

!

Glenn as astronaut Alan Shepard In The Right Stuff (inset), and as a being known as Glaeken, who’s not quite as human as he looks, in The Keep.

scon GLENN:

NOW HE CAN SAY NO

LORENZO CARCATERRA TALKS WITH THE MAN WHO'S PLAYED THE DEVIL'S ALTER-EGO AND AMERICA'S FIRST SPACE JOCKEY,

Scott Glenn's path has been a strange one. From smalltown newspaperman to burlesque stage manager to the man who ate the tequila worm in Urban Cowboy, his career has led him down a circuitous, often treacherous trail. Now, thanks in part to strong performances in both The Right Stuff and Personal Best his voyage of anonym- ity has come to a screeching halt, landing him in that strangest of places, Hollywood, v/ith that strangest of la- bels, Movie Star, pinned to his chest.

Glenn is tall, quiet, intense, temporarily blond-haired (he's been in Tennessee playing opposite Cissy Spacek in The River, a film he describes as "a 1980s Grapes of Wrath"), and as surprised as anyone over the new direction his life has taken. Sitting in the near-empty coffee shop of an overpriced Manhattan hotel, he butters a croissant, sips some coffee, and talks about his career, his new-found stardom, and his new film, Mich.-iel Mann's The Keep.

TZ: Could you please explain The Keep and your role in it?

Glenn: Sometime between one and three thousand years ago the devil incarnate was imprisoned in a monolithic stone structure called The Keep. The devil is one half of two personalities. The flip side is the character 1 play, a sort of cosmic watchdog named Glaeken who waits on earth until the devil is let loose. When a group of Nazis inadvertently free the devil, my job becomes evident — kill him. By killing him, however. I'll be committing suicide, since the devil is just another aspect of my personality. TZ: One of the ironies of the film seems to be the inter- play between the Nazis and the devil.

Glenn: A mind like Adolf Hitler, or the characters in this film who represent that kind of mentality, is the ripest field for the devil or evil to move into. All those things — Hitler, the Nazi Party— are still only a pale reflection of pure evil. (Dne threatens the fabric: of the world, the other threatens the world altogether.

TZ: Why do you suppose the Nazis and the devil hold such a fascination for us?

Glenn: The whole fascination with the Nazi thing is that something so horrible could come out of an ancient Euro- pean culture with intellectual and artistic credentials the equal of any on the face of the earth. The people that shoved Jews and Gypsies into gas furnaces do not only have the blood of Hitler running through their veins — they have the blood of Einstein and Mozart, too.

TZ: Was it difficult moving from the portrayal of an astro- naut (Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff) to someone who's lived for nearly two thousand ye.irs?

Glenn: No, it was refreshing. At least forty percent of the footage for the The Right Stuff was NASA footage, which meant that my role was outside tfie character. 1 had to be exactly as he was. When The Keep came along, I realized it would be one-hundred-percent invention, which was fine

24 Twilight Zone

with me. I didn't have to begin my day sitting in front of videotape equipment.

TZ: In The Keep, how long does it take for the devil to make an appearance?

Glenn: The film takes place over a three-day period. It takes the devil that long to materialize — and as he does so, he essentially develops into three beings, becoming more and more human until, in the end, he is a caricature of me.

TZ: Are you happy with your film career as it's progressed up to this last role?

Glenn: Now I am. Three years ago, I couldn't get arrested. I didn't really start working until I left Los Angeles and moved my family to Idaho. I was prepared to do Shake- speare in the Park— no big roles, but at least they'd let me do it my way.

TZ: Are you now in a position where you can pick and choose the roles you want?

Glenn: Five years ago, I would have begged for three lines on Baretta. Now I've got thirty-five scripts at home — all of which I've said no to. Now / get to say no, not them. After Urban Cowboy, I stayed away from playing the

tough macho guy, even though Fred Silverman wanted me for a series based on Dirty Harry. John Milius sent me three scripts, all similar to the Urban Cowboy character. Instead, I ran into Robert Towne and I did Personal Best for him.

TZ: Was all this worth giving up a newspaper career for? Glenn: Yes. I wasn't all that good at it, anyway. I wanted to be a poet writing epic poetry. Instead, I worked as a police reporter for the Kinosa Daily News and, after a while, began to feel like a ghoul. You had to interview people whose husband had just been killed or who had lost three kids in a trailer camp fire, and you had to ask questions— when all you wanted to do was to put your arms around them. I was looking at human suffering and misery and making my living off it. I didn't like it.

TZ: You've been called the next Steve McQueen. Do those sort of comparisons bother you?

Glenn: Someone once asked Burt Reynolds how he felt be- ing called the young Brando. He said it was better than be- ing called the young Ethel Merman. I'd rather be called a young Paul Muni, but you don't always get what you want. (S

U S POSTAL SERVICE STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by 39 U.S.C. 3665) 1 . Title of pubiicaiion ROO SERLINO’S THE TWILIGH'r ZONE MAGAZINE 1A Publication No 02796090 2. Date ot Ming Nov. 3, 1963 3. Frequency of iHue: bimonttily 3A No of issues sublished annually 6 36. Annual subscription price S15 4. Complete mailing address of known office of publication (not printers) 80C Second Avenue. New York, N.Y. 10017 S. Complete mailing address of the head- quaners or general business offices of ihe publishers (not primers) 800 Second Avenue. New York. N.Y. 10017 6. Full names and com- plete mailing address of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Milton J. Cuevas, Publisher, 600 Second Avenue, New York. N.Y. 1(X)17, T.E 0 Klein. Editor, 8(X) Second Avenue, New York 10017, Robert Sabat. Managing Editor. 600 Second Avenue, New York, N Y 10017 Owner or stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more ot total amount o( stock: TZ Publications, Inc , 600 Second Avenue. New York. N Y 10017, Montcalm Publishing Corp., same as above, Eric Protter, same as above. Nils Shapiro, 3420 Ocean Park Blvd, Santa Monica. CA 90405 6 Known bondholders. None 9 For completion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at special rates. Not applicable 10 Extent and nature ot circulation. Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months A '^otal

No. copies (net press run) 164,163 6 Paid circulation i. Sales through dealers and earners, street vendors and counter sales. 37,166 2. Mail subscription 25,237 C. Total paid circulation (sum of 1081 and 1062)62,405 0. Free distribution by mail, carrier or other means, samples, complimentary, and other free copies 1 .203 E. Total distribution (sum of C and 0) 63.606 F. Copies not distributed 1 Office use. left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing 1,531 2. Return from news agents 99.024 G. Total (sumof E, Ft and 2— should equal net press run shown in A) 164.163 Actual no. copies of single issue published nearest to Ming date A. Total no. copies (net press run) 203.060 6. Paid circulation 1 Sales thorugh dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales 41,396 2.'Mail subscription 76,828 C Total paid circulation (sum of 1061 and 1062) 1 20,224 D. Free distribution by mail, carrier or other means, samples, complimentary, and other free copies 2.872 E. Total distribution (sum of C and 0) 123.096 F. Copies not distributed 1. Office use. left over, unac- counted, spoiled after printing 2,360 2. Return from news agents 77,624 G. Total (sum of E, Fl and 2— should equal net press run shown in A) 203,080. 1 certify that Ihe statements made by me above are correct and complete. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner MILTON J CUEVAS, PUBLISHER

Workshc^ for

3RD ANNUAL WORKSHOP FOR F & SF WRITERS

James Gunn, Director Theodore Sturgeon Ftederik Pohl Brian W. Aldiss

1ST ANNUAL WORKSHOP FOR ARTISTS AND ILLUSTRATORS Hap Henriksen, Director Michael Whelan Real Musgrave James Christiansen

5TH INTERNATIONAL CONFER- ENCE ON THE IN THE ARTS

Fantastic

MARCH 22-25, 1984

Write for details:

College of Humanities Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL 33431

Twilight Zone 25

TZ INTERVIEW

Burgess Meredith: Multidimensional Man

THE TWILIGHT ZONE'S MR. DINGLE TALKS ABOUT DOLPHINS,

, 'THE PENGUIN,' AND THAT OTHER DIMENSION WHERE THE TRUTH RESIDES.

Interviewer James H. Burns reports:

There is no actor better associated with The Twilight Zone than Burgess Meredith, in his four memorabie seg- ments he ient the program an imme- diate stature, thanks not oniy to his deft performances, but to the years of unpar- aiieied experience he brought with him.

Now seventy-five, Meredith has been a star on Broadway (such classic shows as WInterset and Teahouse of the August Moon) and tv (^Playhouse 90, Batman, Gloria), toured with prson Welles's legendary Mercury Theatre, and made over sixty motion pictures, includ- ing the narration of Twilight Zone— The Movie. His honors include Oscar and Golden Globe nominations (Doy of the Locust, Rocky), Broadway's Tony, Emmy nominations for The Last Hurrah and Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (he won for Tall Gunner Joe), and an award from the New York Drama Critics— which he shared with George M. Cohan. He is also celebrated as a theatrical producer and director, most recently for a 1982 Dublin presentation of The Women of James Joyce.

When not busy with Hollywood or the stage, Meredith has conducted orches- tras, created— and often narrated— documentaries and short subjects, and judged wine festivals- in his capacity as a noted connoisseur. He has been married four times and has two children.

Clearly Meredith is a renaissance man, as is evidenced by his current pur- suits: finishing a special on the world's great theaters and another on Robert Frost, acting in an episode of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre for Show- time, and preparing a new production of Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson, bound for New York. It is only fitting that along the way he has worked with some of the arts' finest practitioners— among them Rod Serling himself.

TZ: What was your initial contact with Rod Serling?

Meredith: That came during the mak- ing of the first episode I did, "Time Enough at Last," when Rod came on the set. He had just seen some rushes of the show, which made him very

enthusiastic. He said, "Hey, you're wonderful. Let's do more shows with you. " After that. Rod wrote a Twilight Zone for me each season. Our relation- ship wound up lasting for a long time. And of course, later in our careers, we both did a lot of voice-over work.

TZ: Did you like the episode? Meredith: Yes. It ultimately proved to be the most successful of the Twilight Zones I acted in.

TZ: You once said that one of your own personal regrets was that you never had enough time for reading. Did that give you a special empathy with your character in "Time"? Meredith: I don't know if my iden- tification was a surface one, but I did feel very close to the show's idea. I also remember that "Time" had a Ger- man director named John Brahm who was very helpful.

TZ: In what way?

Meredith: I've found that not all direc- tors appeal to me. Some of them move you around and that's it. Others, like Brahm, are concerned with what you're trying to do and collaborate with you. He seemed to be a first-rate, most in- teresting man. Unfortunately, I only knew him for "Time" and "Mr. Dingle, The Strong," which he also directed.*

I don't think I've ever done any other project that people talk to me more about than that show. Roughly every two or three months, someone comes up to me and mentions "Time Enough at Last." It's gotten to the point where when they first approach me, I

'Brahm died at the age of eighty-nine on October 11, 1982, at his home in Malibu, California. His most famous films, done before Twilight Zone, included The Lodger, Hangover Square, Tonight We Raid Calais, and The Brasher Doubloon. In addition to his twelve Twilight Zone episodes (spread through the show's five seasons), he direc- ted installments of Playhouse 90, Dr. Kildare, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hhriller, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., as well as the pilots for Naked City and The Mod Squad. — JHB

almost know what they're going to say. TZ: 1 would have thought that "Mr. Dingle " would have been more famous. Meredith: No, "Time" is the one that haunts people. The show that I'd like to see again is "Printer's Devil" [by Charles Beaumont], to discover if it's as good as I remember. As I recall, it was an amaz- ing piece. I played the devil, and we had a neat little special effect where I'd hold up my finger and fire would come out. I'd use that power to light cigarettes and the like. Another program that Rod wrote that I particularly remember is "The Little Black Bag" from Night Gal- lery, where I played a surgeon who finds a magical doctor's bag sent to him by the heavens.

TZ: The last shot of "Time Enough at Last," with the books stacked on all those steps, must have been technically difficult to set up.

Meredith: Not as hard as doing Star Wars\ I suppose that the shot was quite ornate for a weekly show, but you have to remember that Twilight Zone was shot at MGM, where they had those ex- terior sets all over the place. As a result, the only thing that Twilight Zone's pro- duction people had to do for that scene was get a few books.

TZ: "Mr. Dingle, The Strong" was the second show that you did with Rod Serling. Were you apprehensive about working with a comedian like Don Rickies?

Meredith: No, because Don wasn't well known back then. A lot of people also don't realize that he's trained as an ac- tor. Don was actually pretty nervous about doing "Mr. Dingle." He's a sweat- er, so you could tell when he was wor- rying! Today, the prospect of working with Don, based on his stand-up act, would be terrifying.

I'm only joking, naturally. In fact, Don's a neighbor of mine in Malibu. We

Meredith played a most unusual neighbor In The Sentinel (1977). "/ thought we were doing a kind of Grand Guignol. "

26 Twilight Zone

gram. I guess Rcid and I just went our separate ways.

TZ; Were the two of you friends? Meredith: We were friends in the sense that movie people say they're friends. Still, I couldn't tell you what kind of a man Rod was, except that he was small, dark, and kind of looked at you under his eyebrows. You always thought that things were clicking away inside of him faster than met the eye. He had a lot of nervous energy. He wasn't unkind, but he gave the impression that he always had something going on in his mind that was probably a little more important than talking witfi you.

TZ: According to reports, there was also a darker side of Serling, in that he was deeply troubled by "the human condition."

Meredith: Underneath Rod, there was kind of a dark cloud, but he didn't burden people with it. The shadow fell on him more than on anybody else. TZ: It’s been said that as Twilight Zone went on. Rod's battles with the network wore him down.

Meredith: Fighting with the networks can take a lot out of you. I've never had anything to do with networks— particularly on series — where they didn't give us a hard time. Doing tv is like the comfort of eating at a picnic with wolves around. All you can do is take the network interference with laughter, but Rod wasn't that type of man. What's odd is that people keep getting surprised by what the networks and studios do, .as though they haven't always acted that way. I remember that when I started to direct a short subject on the c:artoonist Charles Ad- dams, a great friend of mine, I shot a scene where he was sitting outside on the grass with his girlfriend, having lunch. They were having a good time, laughing and the like. Then, when the camera pulled back, you saw that they were sitting in a cemetery. That senti- ment is also applicable to what it's like trying to enjoy yourself while dealing with the networks. When the camera pulls back, you see where you are. TZ: It's said that Hollywood was like that even in the thirties.

Meredith: I didn't come to California until the late thirties, but even then the studio situation was terrible. Holly- wood was dominated by five or six tyrants. The big studio heads could kill you. My ex-wife, Paulette Goddard, was told one day by a studio chief that she wasn't going to get work anymore. After that, she didn't get any work. Two phone calls and her career was

shout at each other and have a lot of fun.

TZ: Richard Matheson told us in a TZ interview back in 1981 that one of the extra pleasures of working on Twilight Zone was that a good portion of the time was devoted to the actors, direc- tor, and writer sitting around a table rehearsing each particular episode before shooting actually commenced. Meredith: That's right. I didn't realize it back then, but that rehearsal time was pretty unusual. And perhaps the rela- tionships developed at those sessions help explain why I stayed in touch with many of the show's behind-the-scenes people after Twilight Zone went off the air. Today, though, a day's read-though is common. We even did it on Gloria. TZ: Did it ever bother you that Twilight Zone seemed to typecast you as a meek man?

Meredith: 1 only would have been both- ered if the scripts weren't good. I don't recall, however, ever thinking those roles were alike. They seem in my mem- ory to have been quite different and in- teresting. For example, there's a world of difference between the meekness — if that's the right word — of the man in "Time Enough at Last" and the char- acter in the "The Obsolete Man." The truth is, I'd do almost any project that Rod asked me to. In fact, in the back of my mind I recall that toward the end of Twilight Zone’s run. Rod

wanted me to do a new series with him in which I'd be a continuing character. He probably wanted me because every- thing else we had done together had been successful. I remember that we had a couple of meetings, but I can't recall what the show was going to be. Ask Carol Serling what we tentatively talked about.* I'm not sure why we never got around to doing the pro-

*We did, and discovered that the proposed series was an extension of the Twilight Zone episodes "Mr. Bevis" and "Cavender Is Coming," both chronicling the misadven- tures of an angel trying to help humans — in the first, the title character (portrayed by Orson Bean), and in the second, Carol Bur- nett. Henry Jones played the angel in "Mr. Bevis" and comedian Jesse White did so in "Cavender." Marc Scott Zicree, in The Twilight Zone Companion, suggests that the "Mr. Bevis" series would have detailed Bevis's antics, with the angel always bailing him out of trouble, and that Serling wanted Meredith to play Bevis. It seems equally possible, however, that Meredith was of- fered the part of the angel, and that the proposed series would have shown the angel helping out a new human each week (which was, according to Zicree, Serling's revised intent for "Cavender"). Meredith later confirmed our interpretation. The idea of having a bumbling angel aid a new group of humans finally made it to the tube as an extremely short-lived ABC tv series in the late '1970s, starring Carl Reiner. Serling was not involved. — JHB

"The one that haunts people.” Maredith survived an atomic war— and The * Day After— in Rod Seriing’s "Time Enough at Last," his most ceiebrated Twilight Zone role.

28 Twilight Zone

over. At least today, things have some- what improved; otherwise, I would never have moved to Los Angeles. The networks, however, still operate more or less the same way they always have. TZ: One of the characters you're best known for having portrayed is the vil- lain called "the Penguin" on Batman. Was that fun to do?

Meredith: It was a riotous experience. Everyone had a good time working to- gether, and we got to do an awful lot of ad-libbing. Mine usually came when the Penguin would insult Batman by calling him "Bat-boob" or "Bat-this" and "Bat-that." I remember that during the middle 1960s, when Batman was produced, I had already given up smoking for twenty to twenty-five years — but I had to smoke all the time as the Penguin. The smoke would get caught in my throat. Since I didn't want to constantly ruin takes by coughing out loud, which the smoke forced me to do, I developed the Penguin's "quack, quack" to cover it. Actually, it was a pretty unlikely noise for the Penguin to make. It sounded more like a duck! The quack got so famous, though, that whenever the writers couldn't think of anything fun- ny to put in their scripts, they'd write a "quack, quack" for me. I also developed that little penguin walk.

TZ: You once said, years ago, that when considering work in television, "You should just take the money and run." Is that why you did Batman! Meredith: I did it for two reasons, one of which was salary. The other was that, after its first fitw episodes. Bat- man became the in thing to do. Every- body—including Frank Sinatra — would either play a villain or appear as them- selves in that cameo showcase where a celebrity would poke his head through the window of a building that Batman and Robin were climbing. I even re- member Otto Preminger saying to me, "My God, my son won't speak to me unless I get a job on Batman." Eventu- ally he got in [as "Mr. Freeze"]! Actu- ally, we didn't get as much money from the show as you might think. The main impetus to continue appearing on Batman was that it v^as fashionable.

Recently there' ve been plans to do a new Batman movie. There was a kind of half inquiry as to whether I'd like to play the Penguin. I said, "No thanks. The joke's over for me." Word came back that they're going to get some famous actor for the part.

TZ: I've heard that Dudley Moore is interested in playing the Penguin.

Meredith: He'd be very good. Of course, someone also remade Of Mice and Men a while back for tv. [Robert Blake portrayed Meredith's original role.] That type of thing doesn't hurt me. Actually, I'm kind of sorry that I ever did Batman — as I think some of the’ show's other regulars are — because it's kind of pursued us all of our lives. For the past several years, people have sometimes introduced me by saying, "Burgess Meredith, best known for Batman ..." I'm not against Batman, it's just that the overemphasis on my doing the part has been a little ridic- ulous. I mean, when you've spent your entire life working as an actor in so many different things and then some- one comes up to you and says, "Gee, I just loved you in Batman ..."

TZ: Especially when you've had a ca- reer as varied as yours, writing, pro- ducing, and directing as well as acting. I understand that your first experience behind the camera was a training film you made for the military during World War II.

“The news is not here— it’s in the other

dimension.”

Meredith: Yes, it was called Welcome to Britain, an orientation film that every poor soldier arriving in England had to see. It was my directorial debut, and I also acted in it. It's one of the things in my career that I'm proudest of. Garson Kanin and the great direc- tor Anthony Asquith helped advise me on directing it. The second one that I was associated with was called Salute to France, co-directed by Kanin and Jean Renoir. We had to make it in secret, because at that time no one was supposed to know that the Allies were planning to enter through France rather, than Italy. Eventually I also got to know Ernie Pyle, the great war cor- respondent, when I portrayed him in The Story of G.l. Joe.

TZ: Your later directorial work in- dicates that you're a fantasy fan.

-

Meredith: Yes, but fantasy is very ticklish stuff to do. Very often it's better if it plays in your head. And you also have to be very careful when adapting it. For example, a lot of Ray Bradbury's stuff hasn't made the transition suc- cessfully. I once did a record reading some of Ray's stories, though, which seemed to work beautifully, because the fantasy was still in your mind.

TZ: Bradbury has said that you were his personal choice for the album. Meredith: Ray and 1 have been friends for a long time. He's also one of my favorite writers in the fantasy area, along with Carlos Castenada. I have terrific admiration for him.

TZ: What's interesting about your friendship with Bradbury and your ear- ly stage and screen work is that it all seems to suggest that you were always attracted to fantasy material, even before your association with Twilight Zone.

Meredith: I guess that I've always felt that the farther away you can get from reality, the better. The news is not here, so to speak. It's in the other dimension.

TZ: That probably helps account for your interest in sensory-deprivation tanks.*

Meredith: I became interested in senso- ry derivation through the work of Dr. ♦ John C. Lilly, who invented the tanks, but what had originally fascinated me was his work with dolphins. I was at- tracted almost mystically to them, as many people are, because they're such an intelligent and beautiful species. I had even written a story about dol- phins. Then it occurred to me that there was a person I had heard about who knew more about dolphins at the time, the early 1970s, than anybody else in the world: John Lilly. At that point I simply set out to meet him, go- ing practically unheralded to his house. John invited me in and we became friends. I was virtually made a member of his family. For about six or seven years 1 played an active part in John's organization, the Human/Dolphin Foundation. Unfortunately, due to my schedule, I recently had to resign. I'm on "emeritus" standing now.

TZ: What were your experiences in the sensory deprivation tank?

Meredith: One of absolute rest. As in- tended, the tank was an aid to the

‘Enclosed, usually coffinlike structures in which one lies prone, floating in water, sur- rounded by total darkness — as popularized in Altered States. — JHB

Twilight Zone 29

1. "The in thing to do. " As "the Penguin,’’ Meredith (here with Caroiyn Jones) was one of Batman's favorite viiiains. 2. "re// me about the rabbits.

Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr., as George and the hapiess Lenny .in the 1939 fiim of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. 3. Meredith (with Eiieen Heckart) as a maiign crippie in Burnt Offerings (1976), and (4.) as Mickey, Sylvester Stallone’s trainer in Rocky (1976). 5. "/ have to wear this damn beard. " Meredith was a lively ancient Greek in 198rs dash of fhe Tifanst

elimination of earthly intrusions. Since sight, sound, and partial gravity are re- moved, I could concentrate on my breathing and meditation. Some people —including Barbara Carrera, whom I introduced to the tanks— become so enamored of the experience that they buy their own for their homes. Ulti- mately I found that I didn't need it, be- cause I can achieve the same level of peacefulness strictly through medita- tion, which I do frequently. I had also never had any of the weird experiences with the tank that some other people have encountered. Of course, I also went into the tank once — and only once — under the influence of drugs. I used Ketarnine, with a doctor's guid- ance. I didn't find that session at all beneficial.

TZ; Was it a bad experience?

Meredith: I just found that it was jolting rather than of any value. In- stead of opening up doors of percep- tion, the drugs got in the way. I’ve taken a couple of the cactus drugs about a half-dozen times, but always with someone like Lilly around to make sure everything stayed under control. I was simply curious about what the drugs could do. I didn't wind up having bad experiences with them.

either— I just dislik^ed their effects. Taking the drugs also seemed to me to be slightly unholy. Today, I don't even smoke pot; I can't smoke anything. If other people want tq do drugs, I sup- pose that's up to them. Although I just walk away from anybody who does coke. Cocaine's just a bore.

TZ: Coke's also ruinftig a lot of Holly- wood's great talents.'

Meredith: It's stupid. Luckily, my mind is very attracted to altered states, but only when I go there on my own.

TZ: Getting back to your career, you've been quite active in fentasy and horror films, starting with Burnt Offerings, in which you played the crippled brother. Is it a little difficult on the ego to play someone who isn't v!ry attractive? Meredith: On the e^?. Would I mind playing Toulouse-Lautrec or the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Of course not! In any event, my part in Burnt Offerings was prettjj small. I couldn't have worked on it for more than a week. A nice benefit, though, was that 1 got -to meet Oliver Reed, who has since become a good friend.

TZ: You also did a horror film called The Sentinel. It insrared some contro- versy due to director Michael Winner's use of real-life deformed people to rep-

resent Satan's minions.

Meredith: During production, I thought that we were doing an exceptional pic- ture—a kind of Grand Guignol, bear- ing relation to some of the great Italian surrealistic films. I overestimated it. TZ: Some critics said that Winner's use of the deformed people was exploit- ative. Winner claimed that they had the time of their lives.

Meredith: I was interested in those people and talked to them. They all seemed to be glad to be in the film, which can easily be believed if you look at the history of freaks getting in- volved with circuses and other areas- of show business.

TZ: The other major horror picture that you did v/as Magic, directed by Richard Attenborough (Gandhi). Be- fore its release, you said that you would be disappointed if Magic be- came known as "just another horror film." You felt that it had "many Faust- ian overtones." "•

Meredith: I felt somewhat different about Magic after I saw it. 1 could un- derstand why the audiences were not as interested in it as I thought they might be, because there were no char- acters that they could identify with. If the hero turns out to be someone who is hard for an audience to be enthusias- tic about — a murderer — who were they supposed to be interested in? I guess that, like The Sentinel, it was a type of Grand Guignol, but it didn't sell tick-

30 Twilight Zone

ets. If we knew beforehand how some- thing was going to turn out, we'd be smarter than we are.

TZ: Wasn't there some story involving your having to shave your head for the film?

Meredith: When Magic was about to open, I said in interviews that I was so worried about the possibility of my hair not growing back that I told Joe Levine that if I stayed bald. I'd sue him. Joe insured my hair for five mil- lion dollars. I'd tell reporters I was .praying that my hair wouldn't grow back. After all, with that kind of mon- ey, I could buy a hair transplant. Un- fortunately, my hair returned very quickly. Now, of course, I can admit that it was really all just a publicity stunt.

TZ: The Rocky series was well ac- cepted both critically and commercial- ly. Did the massive success of the first film come as a surprise?

Meredith: We thought that Rocky was a good picture, but had no precogni- zance of its enormous impact until its first sneak preview, which was for a college audience. The film got such tre- mendous response that it opened ev- erybody's eyes. I said to myself, "This picture is going through the sky." For opce, I was right! And playing Mickey was fun, because very often I only get to play cerebral people.

TZ: Your most recent fantasy work was as Ammon, a man of the theater

in anrfent Greece, in Ray Harryhau- sen's Clash of the Titans.

Meredith: Clash was great fun to make, because we shot all over Eu- rope: Spain, Italy, Malta, England, and France. Ray Tlarryhausen had great hopes for Clash to be accepted as a work of meritj^t^fortunately, although it did all right at the box office, critics seemed to think that it was old-fash- ioned or somejhing. I liked the film, of course, but Ray was hurt by its crit- ical reception. ' He's a man who's kept to his own techniques.* As a result, maybe some of the fantasy scene has passed ‘him by. Nevertheless, I loved working with Ray and with all the dif- ferent actors that Clash featured, including Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Calire Bloom, and Ursula An- dress. I remember saying to Olivier be- fore the shooting started, "Oh, God, Larry, I have to wear this damn beard while we're going to be all over the desert." He said [mimicking Olivier], "I'll fix that for you, old boy." Larry brought the director, Desmond Davis, over and said to him, "Why have you got my friend here wearing a beard? In the theater in those days, old boy, the actors never wore beards. They *

'Harryhausen has refused to use computer- controlled devices and certain other effects advances which could conceivably hasten his stop-motion animation process and im- prove its quality. — JHB

couldn't wear them. Don't you under- stand that, old boy? If the actors wore beards, they couldn't put masks on. If they couldn't put masks on, they couldn't do their plays. So it's very sil- ly for Burgess to wear a beard." Des- mond waited until Larry had finished and then replied, "Well, Sir Laurence, Meredith's not playing an actor. He's playing a playwright." Larry turned to me and said, "That fucks it, Meredith." He had given an impassioned speech on the wrong subject!

I remember when we were shoot- ing a scene where a whole bunch of us were walking across some great desert, on location, in a long shot with the camera far away. We had to do the walking — which was the only element that scene contained — again and again. After a while, everybody started com- plaining. To help relieve the mo- notony, I made up a marching chant: "Lloyds of London, Barclay's Bank/ Lloyds of London, Barclay's Bank ..." We compensated for the boredom by counting the money we were getting for the picture.

TZ: You have been — -and are — in- volved in a great many different areas. Is variety the secret of your longevity, even if only on personal terms? Meredith: Well, all I know is that, with my afting, f look over the parts I'm of- fered and pick the ones I think I can do. T don't Jnake a concerted effort to vary them. I simply select the ones that I like. With the other elements of my life, I just pursue my interests, which are varied. I've even toured colleges as a guest speaker. I did one tour about Carlos Castenada's writings and anoth- er, entitled "An Evening with Burgess Meredith," made up of readings and the like, directed by Charles Laughton. More recently, the American Program Bureau [a service which books lecturers at colleges] has been after me to do a tour on Robert Frost.

TZ: Since you're still very much in the public eye, have you ever considered producing another film?

Meredith: I've thought of leaping off a cliff, but nothing as awful as producing again. Jumping in boiling oil might even be preferable.

TZ: Last year you were brought back to The Twilight Zone when you did the narration for the motion picture version.

Meredith: Yes, the script they sent me was a pleasant surprise in that — format- wise, anyway — it seemed pretty close to the show. So I decided to do it. (continued on page 80)

Twilight Zone 31

AN OLD DOG, A LONELY LITTLE BOY, AND A IMTHEIT CREEPY BABY]:SITTER ARE THE FEATURED PERFORMERS IN THIS YEAR’S CROP OF PRIZEWINNfNG STORIES

BY NEW WRITERS.

*• .•

qjfbur Third Annual

Short Story Contest

^ * ♦

CHOSEN BY THE EDITORS OF

• . »

The!

HONORABLE MENTION

Michael G. Berry, .Aleilandrja, VA . Nancy Burks, Granbury, TX * Donna Buschmeisr, Clementon, NJ Harvey F, Charirand and * George Shirreff, Ottawa, Ontario j9hn R. CIancey, Jr., Steubenville, OH Richard Corbo, Torrington. CT gat-Oade, Takoma Park, MO David A. Downing, Wenatchee, WA C. K. Fassett, Fair Oaks, CA Scott Grantham, Rock Hill, SC Ron Gray, Garland, TX Michael Grisi, Jackson, NJ

Native Music The Cows . After Midnight

To Share Its Darkness On1he Edge The Cabbie

That Time of the Month’ Forestflight Re-llex-ens .

What Are Friends For? Second Chance Father’s Day

James B. Kristian, Oceanside, CA Billie Marsh, Tulsa, OK Elizabeth Massie, Waynesboro, VA Patricia L. McCune, San Diego, CA Joseph M. O’Conner, Auburn, ME Stephen Phillips, Belfry, KY Ron Rajecki, Parma, OH Victor L. Rosemund, San Diego, CA James D. Seward, Bettendorf, lA Barbara J. Tebben, Minneapolis. MN Charles Wagner, Torrance, CA Johnny R. Willis, Greenville, NC Howard Wornom, Hampton, VA

A C[iildren’s Game The Game Dust Cover

The Apricet Berdette-Coote That Day by the River White Retrospect Incident on a Snowy Night Zap Scam TheFiredoor/

By Highway 35 By the Banks of the Solomon The Guise-Gootas Old Habits

32 Twilight Zone

Illustratfons by Stephen W. Andrus

First Place:

Invitation to a Party

by Jon Cohen

e should be back from the party by twelve, Miss Lordo. My husband will give you a ride home."

"Not Miss Lordo— Iris." Iris lifted her upper lip the way a dog will do just before it growls, smiled at Mrs. Sherwood. Now tell me that the numbers for the police and fire department are by the phone.

"And, God forbid you should need them, police, fire, emergency numbers, that sort of thing, are right by the phone. I guess there's really nothing else. Don't let them stay up too much longer." She pulled on her coat. 'You're very good with children, I'm told."

"I have a way with them, yes. I think I hear your husband honking for you. You'd better go."

"You're right, Robert will have a fit if we're late." She knelt before her brood. "Who has a kiss for Mommy?" They gathered around and kissed her quickly, their lips skipping off her taut cheek. "You be nice to Miss Lordo."

"Iris. Goodnight, Mrs. Sherwood." Iris stood just out of view beside the window and watched the

car drive away, then turned to the children. They crowded together, eyes wide. She marched past them into the kitchen and they scrambled after her, bunching up again when she stopped in front of the refrigerator. "Snacktime," she said, pulling out milk and juice. "Who knows where the cookies are?"

"I do," said one of them. "But we can't have any. We're not allowed." Iris stood looking at him, then shot across the kitchen and scooped him up, pushed her face close to his. "You and I are going on a cookie patrol," she said, flashing her dog-smile.

"Up there," he said, wriggling wildly and pointing to a cupboard above the sink. She put him down and he ran back to the startled little group crowding against the refrigerator.

"Until Mommy comes home I'm your mommy. Understand?" Chewing a cookie she shook the box at them. "So, snacktime." The oldest one moved toward the box with the apprehension of a squirrel approaching a hand holding a peanut. "Go ahead, take it. Let's everybody come sit at the table. Juice or milk? Have as many cookies as you want." Each took one. "As many as you want, I said. Pass

Twilight Zone 33

Invitation to a Party

that box around again." The child nearest her eyed the others and grabbed a handful. They stared at his great pile. There was a giggle and another did the same. Chaos at the table, the children shrieked and snatched at the box, dizzy with this wonderful violation of the rules.

Cookies gone, they turned to Iris, eager for . the next desecration. "Now what can we do. Iris?"

She leered at her little converts. "Well, let's see. What aren't you usually allowed to do at night?"

"Play out in the yard." "Watch tv except weekends." "Ride bikes." "Pillow fights."

"We're never allowed to have pillow fights," said the oldest.

"Maybe Iris will let us." How far would she let them go?

"Bedtime," said Iris. The children grinned, unsure. "Bedtime," she repeated.

"We're never going to bed," they said, teasing her back.

"Bet you are," she said, cleaning up the mess on the table.

"Bet we're not," said t^e littlest, excited by ' this bold ,game.

Iris walked to the sink, paused, then whirled around. "I bet if you're not in bed in two minutes. I'll tell your mommy you ate all the cookies." She turned away from them and ran water over the dishes.

"You said we could, Iris. You said."

She kept her back to them. "I'll say, 'Mrs. Sherwood, those bad little children weren't out of my sight five minutes. When I came into the kitchen, there they were gobbling down cookies. The whole box, Mrs. Sherwood, the whole box.' That's just what I'll tell her if I count to three and you're still sitting at that table. One ..."

The children darted out of the room in a squealing panic. Iris went to the bottom of the stairs' and called up, "I'll come tuck you in after a while. Remember to say your prayers." She could hear them rushing around, whispering. Beds squeaked, a toilet flushed, one of them knocked something to the floor— a pile of books, maybe a heavy toy. "Sorry," yelled a voice down to her.

/t was a big house, so Iris wandered through several rooms before she found the living room. That's where she always began. There's so much here. I'll never get to see it all. She'd have to hurry. No, if I hurry it will ruin it. She'd have to be selective then, miss some rooms. Her favorite things were bureaus, dressers, and desks, because they had drawers. Pulling out a drawer, to Iris, was like opening a present; there was always a secret surprise inside. Since they were so special she saved them for l^t.

First she did the furniture. Sometimes something good would slip down under a cushion.

She tugged on the sofa cushicjns, but they were sewed on somehow. She pushed her hand between the cracks but didn't come up with anything. Nothing in any of the chairs, either; she felt herself growing warm with irritation. They're probably never in here. People with big houses never go into most of their rooms, sit on any of their furniture. They just own things. Anger knifed her and she sud- denly looked up as if she could see into the chil- dren's rooms above her. They'd still be awake, maybe even sneaking in and out of each other's bedrpoms. Well, let them, so long as they keep quiet, don't spoil my night. She gazed around the room, feeling better, and decided the coffee table, would be. next. Not as many knickknacks on it as she'd hoped. She picked up an onyx owl and caressed it. Then a small marble box, her fingers fluttering over its cool sides, not ready to open it. Holding it to her breast, she left the room, turned out the light behind her. She stood a moment in the doorway, then turned on the light again and walked back in. Now it was her living room. She put her bpx down next to her owl. Until she heard their car drive up, the house, everything, was hers.

Time for the drawers, time to get inside the drawers. She opened the top drawer of the small bureau. She slid her hand in, touched things, went in more deeply. Searching, fef!ling, she found an invitation to a dinner party and read it; then, returning it, she closed the drawer and walked away.

She paused.

Where did I put that dinner party invitation? I know, it's in the top drawer of the bureau. She moved back to the bureau and sure enough, there it was, right where she had put it last week.

A sound from upstairs jolted her. Her eyes cut to the ceiling and down again to the invitation. It was Mrs. Sherwood's — the invitation was addressed to Mrs. Sherwood, not to her. The floor I tilted. Let me alone. This is my house tonight, mine.

♦ She slipped to the floor, shut lier eyes against the intrusion of the children, and lay there motionless, breathing in little controlled puffs. She recovered herself slowly. Then she was able to stand. The invitation was in her hand and she stared at it — it was addressed to her again. She smiled and nodded her head. I must remember to accept.

She moved the oak dresser across the room and stroked its hard surface. Can I get inside? It was easy. The dresser drawer had odd bits of silver on top, linen and several frayed anrimacassars beneath. Yes, I remember. Her grandmother had crocheted ' the antimacassars years and years ago. A sweet scent drifted toward her — the lavender sachet she had put

♦ in with the linen last winter. She lost herself inside ^ the drawer.

"Iris?" came a small voice behind her. She

♦ slammed it shut and whipped around. It was the

i

34 Twilight Zone

skinny one. The child backed away. "Janey's crying and won't stop." He ran out of the room. "I'll come up," Iris yelled after him. She looked around her, at the paintings, the furniture, the lamps and tables, at the room itself; all this, these things that were hers, that possessed her, changed and fell away. / just want it for one night, for a few hours, and you won't give it to me. You have all this, these rooms you never see, drawers you never open, children you leave with strangers. She hugged herself to hold in her mounting fury. The room tilted, spun, and she with it. She ran into the kitchen. Whirling, she scattered silverware, searching for a knife. Janey was crying. Iris could hear her. Stop stop stop, this is my house. She rushed back into the living room, the knife high above the sofa, ready to slash at it. Then her arm dropped to her side. No.

"I'm coming, Janey, just a minute," Iris called

to her.

She returned to the kitchen to pick up her mess. The glasses tfiey had used for their snack were dry now, and she put them back in the cupboard.

All right, children. Here I come.

They could hear her walking up the stairs. It got quiet as she stood in the hall trying to decide where they were; the house was so big each child had its own room. They heard her moving again, opening a door. The bathroom. Another, the hall closet. Janey's was next. Iris quietly shut the door and moved toward the bed, a hand behind her back. "Mommy has something for Janey. Something to stop the tears. Want to see?" Janey nodded, reached out. Iris showed her and Janey made a squeaking sound. "A cupcake I found just for you. Eat it quick and no crumbs in the bed." When she finished. Iris wiped her mouth with a Kleenex and tucked her in.

Iris wandered down the hall, stopping in each of their rooms, telling stories, or tickling them, or reading out loud until they fell asleep. The last child was the skinny one. He was sitting in bed hunched against his pillows. "Don't be afraid of Mommy," said Iris.

"You're not my mommy," he said, watching her. Iris tilted her head as if she didn't understand. "Don't be afraid," she said again, moving toward him.

When she came out the house was hers. She went into the batfiroom and washed her hands, lathering and rinsing until she felt clean. Where is my towel ... oh, of course. She reached for the one with Mother embroidered on it.

Robert will he coming back soon. I'd better get ready. She hurried into her bedroom to find something to wear, then decided what she had on would be good enough. I should put on some makeup, though, comb my hair. She sat at her dresser, found a lipstick, and pouted her lips in the mirror. The photograph beside the mirror: she leaned closer to look at it. Robert and the children

The last child was the skinny one. He was sitting in bed hunched

against his pillows. "Don't be afraid of Mommy," said Iris.

at the beach. It was so hot that day I had to beg them to stand still while I took the picture. So hot, the sun glaring off the sand and the water making them squint. Iris picked up the picture and held it in the lamplight, squinted back at them, puzzled. The skinny one on the end, he didn't belong to her — "you’re not my mommy" — what was he doing there? A playmate met on the beach, a neighbor's child? She couldn't remember. A car pulled into the driveway; Iris heard the gravel popping under the tires. Robert's back from picking her up. She looked again at the strange boy, couldn't remember, and placed the photograph beside the mirror.

Robert will have a fit if we're late. She ran down the hall. They came in the back door just as Iris reached the bottom of the stairs. "Let me get my coat and I'll be right there," she called.

"All right. I'm ready to go," she saidj rushing into the kitchen. She Smiled at Robert, then turned to the woman standing beside him, looking her over, decided she'd do. "The children are asleep," Iris said to her. "There's really nothing else to tell you. The numbers for the police and fire department are by the phone." The woman appeared confused, shrugged her shoulders at Robert as Iris headed for the door. "Goodnight," Iris called behind her. "Come on, Robert, we don't want to be late." Frowning, Robert shrugged back at his wife, then followed Iris out to the car.

Mrs. Sherwood hurried upstairs. Miss Lordo's bizarre chatter had bothered her; she'll not take care of my children again. She looked into the first room. Janey was asleep and Mrs. Sherwood gave her a kiss. She grew calmer as she moved quickly down the hall kissing each sleeping child. She could hear the car pulling out of the driveway as she opened the last door.

"What's that . . . ?" Robert stopped the car to

listen.

"What's what? I didn't hear anything," said Iris. "Robert, don't worry, everything's fine. We have a very good sitter." From her side of the car Iris could see Mrs. Sherwood struggling to open the upstairs bedroom window. "Yes, very good, and she has a real way with children. I'm told. Now, come on, Robert, let's go or we'll be late for the party. "|jg

Twilight Zone 35

Second Place:

Demy at Midnight

by Pamela /. lessen

enny sat poised at the top of the hill on his low-slung plastic Big Wheel. With a four- year-old's patience, he mentally measured the distance he'd cover before making his spin-out into his own driveway. Meters, feet, inches — he knew nothing of these. He only knew he could go up the street to the fire hydrant, then turn and fly as fast as his three-wheeler would let him past the green-and-white house, the gold house, the brick house and, with a grab at the handbrake, spin wild- ly into his own wide driveway. It was a perfect way to spend a summer day.

Only . . . only it would sure be lots more fun if he had a friend to ride with him. Someone to shout back and forth to — “C'mon!" “Let's go!" "Yahoo!'’ “Race you!'’

No one to race.

Instead, Denny raced the clouds overhead, the breeze that ruffled the hair from his eyes, the butterfly oblivious to everything but the next flower. And at night he raced the moon . . .

oaning, Sarah jerked upright in bed, eyes wide, sweat soaking her thin summer night- gown.

"What's the matter?" Mumbled, sleepy words. Her husband Paul touched her arm, gently drawing her back down to the pillows.

"Did ypu hear it?" She whispered hoarsely, grabbing the front of his t-shirt.

"What?" Infinite patience, perfect kindness.

Sarah felt like screaming at him, pounding his chest, forcing him to admit he'd heard the same summer sounds echoing on the night wind. How could he be so calm all the time when she felt so twisted and broken inside?

"What was it you thought you heard?" he asked, gently, softly.

'Thought? Sarah stiffened at the implication, then relaxed a bit.

"I must have been dreaming," she breathed. "That same dream ..."

Silence from Paul. He knew the dream; no need to tell him anything more.

"Try to sleep. You'll feel better in the morn- ing." Less kindness. More stock answers, reassur- ances. Subtle ways to tell her to leave him alone — don't stir up his own nightmares.

"Okay."

They hugged, without warmth, and Paul rolled onto' his left side, away from her.

Sarah lay awake, studying the bright spot on the ceiling where the light spille<i in from the street- lamp. When soft snoring assured her that Paul was asleep, she quietly rose from the bed and left the room.

She paused by the doorw'ay to the children's room. Pale light, cast by a gl(3wing nightlight, il- luminated their sleeping faces. I'hey were so full of life and active when awake. Seeing them this way, they seemed frozen in time, stalk, unchanging. Her eye lingered for a moment on tlie empty bed in the

36 Twilight Zone

corner that had be<jn Denny's.

The younger one stirred restlessly. He'd always been more attuned to her than Jason, her older son, somehow sensing her wakefulness and waking himself at tlae same time. Quietly she hurried away, hoping he'd isettle again once whatever mental emanations they shared were weakened by distance.

Sarah stood on the redwood deck, drinking in the cool night air. The moon lay over to the west, waning gibbous but still luminous enough to cast pale shadows in tfie yard. The swing set creaked, almost as if someone sat in one of the swings, and a wind chime sounded, light and airy like distant laughter, high and thin.

She pulled her robe tighter. The nightmare still lurked in her conscious mind, overlaying mun- dane things with ghostly images, sounds. She breathed deeply, smelling the dew collecting on the grass and flowers and — something else? Something familiar, but long absent, something from the dream that was warm, alive, and flushed from the sun . . .

"Mommy?"

Sarah's heart thudded painfully against her rib cage. She turned and saw her younger son gazing at her with puzzled, sleepy eyes.

"Sean, what are you doing out here?" As if she didn't already know. The distance between them had made no difference after all. He was aware of her restlessness and had come seeking her.

"Mommy, I'm cold."

Sarah gathered him up in her arms to carry him back to bed. hie was slight for his age, and he snuggled close to her, his small arms clasped tightly around her neck.

As Sarah opened the sliding glass doors from the deck to the house, she heard him say in his thin voice, "'Night, Denny."

She stared at her son, following his gaze out beyond the deck to the swings. They moved slowly in the night air, but no figure appeared, magically or otherwise.

"Why did you say that?"

But Sean's eyes were already closed, his breathing slow and even. Sarah put him in his bed and pulled the covers up, regarding him as a slight chill crept about her. It seemed her nightmare re- fused to end even though she knew herself to be awake.

As softly as she could, she eased herself back into bed beside Paul. She could have saved the ef- fort, for he turned :o her almost immediately.

"Where have you been?"

"Just out to get some air. I couldn't sleep. Then Sean came out so I put him to bed and came back myself." Pause; one heartbeat, two. "He said the strangest thing when I was carrying him inside."

"Oh?" The voice sounded hollow in the dark. He'd put his arm about her to draw her closer, but then stopped.

"He said, "Night, Denny.' Why do you sup- pose— "

"Christ!" The word emerged, a softly spoken explosion. "Why can't you leave it alone? He's gone. Nothing any of us can do will ever change that. You and your crazy dreams . . . Even little Sean is begin- ning to pick up on it. You can't keep mourning for- ever, Sarah. Denny is dead. We have to let him be! Let him go to whatever special place is reserved for children taken before their time. You won't even let me take his bed out of the other kids' room. How can you do that to them? To us?"

It was the longest speech he'd ever made on the subject. Usually he avoided talking about it, steering her away from the knife .edges of grief by gentle maneuvering and manipulation. But the dreams kept on, forcing them closer and closer to the jagged cliff face that Denny's death had put before them.

"You don't feel it like I do," she mouthed, not believing it, but knowing he would at least respond, not turn away as he had so often before.

"How can you say that?" His voice was rough, his breathing ragged with unshed tears. "He was my son, too."

"But the dreams. I can't stop the dreams. He's out there, racing up and down the sidewalk — and out back on the swings."

Moans again, but not hers. His.

"Paul, I can't ignore the dreams. They make it seem as if he's here^ For a time, he is here. Even ♦ Sean feels him." More softly. "He's so alone ..."

"Then why not me and Jason? What makes you so special?"

"I don't know. I don't know." This was going nowhere, like all the other times. Night was greying into morning. "Go to sleep, Paul. You're right. Den- ny is gone and my dreams won't bring him back." Give in, give in. Too tired to argue anymore.

Paul turned roughly away from her. They both felt the wall growing between them, almost a living presence, but neither felt strong enough to pull it apart.

Silent tears slid down Sarah's face, dampening her pillow yet again. Sleep took her and she dreamed . . .

enny sat poised at the top of the hill on his Big Wheel. But now, not so alone. He felt it. Somehow, somewhere, just beyond his edge of vision, just out of hearing, someone was there. Soon, if he kept practicing his riding, perfecting the skid, his mother would be with him, and after her, Sean. He knew it. He wanted it. So bad. Hurry, hurry, he pleaded silently.

He pushed off with his feet, racing down the hill, hair streaming, eyes laughing, skidding to a stop on a driveway just made for that purpose in a summer that knew no end. IS

Twilight Zone 37

obby Pierce wasn't really thinking of any- thing when the traffic light at the intersec- tion of routes 19 and 206 went yellow. Several thoughts had been careening through his head and bouncing off one another as he piloted his motorcycle up the road: his first year of school final- ly over; his girl, an easy-smiling journalism major with a taste for Milton and Spenser who'd noticed and pursued him successfully. Still, the thing that came nearest to occupying his mind was one fact: that having the house to himself for three weeks, after living in a dorm all semester, would be sheer bliss.

Bobby had been planning on getting back in time to see his family off, but with exams and fare- wells and new friends, he hadn't been able. So he would be headed, back to an empty house— and, of course. Dog.

Dog was special, a brown-black mutt who'd wandered into the backyard when Bobby was six years old and just stayed. Growing up, he'd been a good friend. Friend? Hell, Dog was kin. Through all the pain of adolescence, Bobby's arguments with his parents, the running away, the tears and ultimatums and groundings. Dog had been there, sloppy, warm, and — Bobby often suspected — not very bright.

The last time Bobby had called home. Dog wasn't doing very well. The dumb critter had taken a tumble down the cellar stairs and twisted his leg badly. The vet had told Bobby's parents that Dog was just getting old, and that was that. So Bobby was hurrying home, the wind in his hair, to spend some time with his oldest friend. As the light went yellow, he gave the 350 a little gas and looked to the right. There was a blur of blue-black, something rammed the front of his bike, and he jerked, flew awkwardly, twisted . . . And died.

Third Place:

Dog

by Bertram WG. Doyle

on Pierce knew, sure as the Mets were in last place again, that it %vas going to be hot. Heat-shimmering, paint -peeling hot. God- awful hot. As he heaved the Iasi of the luggage into the back of the Subaru wagon, he silently thanked the gods of enlightened consumerism that he had opted for air conditioning over the economic pro- testations of his wife. Slamming the hatch, he turned and headed up the driveway, mentally counting off preparations as he went. Oil, gas, water, traveler's checks, paperboy, mailman, God in Heaven and us in Maine for three weeks. What could be better?

Still, he would miss the house. It was he and Nicki's first and only, an upright and proper Vic- torian, complete with a root cellar that the two of them had fixed up before Robert was born. Pierce smiled; he'd been certain it was a mistake when they'd bought it. So much work! But Yankee in- genuity and Time-Life Books had proven a match for the old grey monster, and after all that effort they'd never sold it the way they had planned.

"Nick! C'mon kids, I swear I hear Maine callin' my name!" he shouted, thinking. I'm a poet but don't know it .. .

The spring on the screen door groaned, and his wife pushed out onto the porch, followed by a small towheaded boy and Dog. Nicki was wearing a Syracuse t-shirt and designer jeans. Her feet were bare, as usual, and an overnight bag was casually slung over her shoulder. She looked anything but her age, which Ron had carefully and considerately forgotten after she'd passed thirty-five. Chris, age seven, was impeccably attired in a lime-colored J.C. Penney sports shirt and matching green pants. And Dog — well, he was just Dog. Kind of brown.

"Why isn't that dog in the basement?" he asked, knowing the answer. "We're outta here in

38 Twilight Zone

two minutesi"

"He wanted to say goodbye," Chris said in his most you-grownups-are-so-ignorant tone. "And it's a cellar."

"Basement, cellar, whatever. Did you padlock the storm door on the side?" He gave the boy a suspicious look. It was Chris's job to lock the out- side door to the root cellar, a curious diagonal struc- ture that Ron Pierce had actually seen only once before, in the tornado scene of The Wizard of Oz. Chris would sometimes leave it open, allowing Dog to escape the cellar and brutalize trashcans throughout the neighborhood.

"Uh-huh. It's locked. Daddy." The boy looked sad.

"Chris says Dog doesn't want to go in the cellar," Nicki whispered, with a sly wink to her hus- band. "Dog told him he wants to wait upstairs, for Bobby."

Pierce frowned. Somehow he always wound up with the thankless task of locking Dog in the base— cellar. He crossed the porch, leaned over, and grabbed Dog's choke collar. Dog, sensing what was about to happen (he knew the word cellar), sank to his haunches and began to whine pitifully.

"C'mon, Dog. Bobby's riding down from school and should be home late tonight ..."

Opening the screen door, keeping it open with his foot.

"Come on. Dog. It's nice and cool . .

Dragging Dog through the hall, into the kitchen.

"Look here. There's food and water and it's only for a couple of hours ..."

The cellar door. Finally.

"Okay, you old mutt," he said tiredly. "Down we go." He opened the door. "Just a while. Dog. Then Bobby'll be home. Remember Bobby? Re- member the rabbits?"

Dog remembered. His tail thumpthumped re- flexively, and his mournful whines turned to loud yips. Pierce looked down the stairs and felt a damp coolness curl over Ids face.

"Rabbits, Dog. Downstairs. Raa-bits!"

And Dog turned and flew down the steps. For a moment. Pierce fcJt a flicker of guilt. He couldn't believe that Dog still remembered the times, years ago, when Bobby .ind Dog would run themselves ragged, chasing imaginary rabbits in the backyard. And that Dog still fell for the cruel "rabbits downstairs" trick.

He looked down. Dog stood at the bottom of the stairs in the rectangular patch of daylight that came through the cellar door. Dog knew he was too slow to reach the lop of the stairs before the tall man closed the door, so he stood motionless, waiting for the door to slam shut, and lock him in darkness.

"A couple of hours. Dog. Honest." Pierce closed the door.

e awoke in darkness, a growl in his throat. Gripped by instincts far older than he was, he lifted and pointed his ears, slowly sniffed at the damp air.

He knew he'd been sleeping for a long time; the warmth beneath him, the tightness in his legs told him it was night. He stood, stretched, and yawned, showing his teeth. Slowly he moved from the stairs and ambled across the dark cellar, through the cobwebbed, dusty chaos of rough wooden shelves, warped game tables, and disassembled bicy- cle parts.

Dog knew the cellar. He knew every corner, every slab and dip in the hard-packed floor. The room was heavy with his scent. But now, as he crossed to the far wall to stand beneath the wooden storm door, he caught the scent, the passing breath, of another . . .

The smell was foul, and red with violence. It reminded him of fighting, of biting and tearing. His fur bristled at the memory.

But Dog was too old to fight, and in a mo- ment the other scent was gone. He lay down and closed his eyes. He was tired, and his bones ached; and the cellar was so cool and quiet and snielled like him . . .

Outside, something pushed heavily at the storm door.

The growl in his throat erupted; sharp, angry barks filled the room. Dog's body tensed. He lowered, dug his back legs into the earth, and howled at — „

Something outside.

Something that quietly rattled, then twisted the padlock with the groan of old metal. Something that pushed inward with an inexorable weight that cracked and splintered the old wood.

But the door held.

Dog's brave barks turned to frightened whines. His chest was choked with hard, pulsing beats, and he tucked his tail between his legs and moved away. He knew that the something outside was stronger than he. Without seeing, he knew. The scent returned, thick with the promise of pain.

He would not fight. He would run and hide. For the first time, he would run . . .

There was a sound like the breaking of bones. Rusted hinges screamed, and the storm door shat- tered, filling the room with splinters and dust. Dog whimpered and moved hesitantly to the pool of moonlight that spilled onto the cellar floor.

Above him a dark, twisted silhouette blocked the doorway. It swayed slowly back and forth, as if moved by a whisper of wind. Dog stood transfixed, his hackles erect, his stomach sour with fear.

". . . Dog ...” A sound; a wet, aching gasp.

". . . so far . . ."

Swaying, whispering. It was a darkness that soothed.

"Couldn't leave . . . you . . . 'lone ..."

Twilight Zone 39

Dog

It moved away from the door; shifting, gut- tering like a drowning candle flame.

. . raa . . . bitsss."

Dog howled and lunged, upward, upward, toward the open doorway. There was a sharp, ugly tearing in his chest, and then he was through. Through the doorway and into the clean night air, alive with scents and shadows. He turned his head slowly and looked across the lawn.

There. He saw the silhouette moving quietly through the darkness, toward a stand of trees that

edged the yard.

Dog moved toward it. It moved fast, but Dog knew he could catch it. He knew he would have to run. Run. So fast.

With a soundless bark. Dog ran to the trees. He ran, his chest filled with wind, his eyes with moonlight. He ran, and his l:)ones lost their aches, and his feet were like wings. He ran and ran . . .

And felt no breeze around him, nor bent a blade of grass, as he ran there . . .

To the trees, where the' rabbits lived. IB

ix-year-old Peter Grimes continued to play

with his miniature Return of the Jedi speeder.

"\Ni\l not,'' Scott said.

"Will too," Peter repeated.

"Wanna bet?" Scott said confidently.

Peter pulled himself up off the sidewalk in front of his house. "Watcha got?"

Scott Brett dug deep into his tattered shorts and produced a half-eaten roll of Life Savers and a worn Star Wars figurine.

Grimes emptied a box of Sweet Tarts into his mouth and tossed if aside. "No way, Jose," he mumbled.

Reluctantly, Scott produced a large ivory- colored shark's tooth his father had given him for his birthday. Peter's eyes lit up.

"What about you?" Scott asked, holding the tooth just out of Peter's reach.

"My entire collection of Matchbox cars," Peter said motioning to the miniature treasures scattered over the sidewalk.

"That include Knightrider?"

Peter nodded.

"And the Jedi Speeder?"

Peter nodded.

"Okay, then prove it," Scott said.

Peter brushed the cars aside and picked out the biggest crack the worn sidewalk had to offer. Scott huddled near the Grimeses front door, peering in at Peter's mother, who was vacuuming the stairs.

With one, quick driving motion, Peter slammed his Kermit the Frog sneaker across the crack.

Mrs. Grimes's scream was short and shrill as she collapsed at the foot of the stairs like a broken doll.

Scott walked slowly toward the grinning Grimes and tossed the tooth at his feet.

"I told you so," Peter said.

"Yeah, well, my dad says if you try to teach a real old dog a new trick, he won't do it."

"Sure he will," Peter said as he admired his winnings.

"Will not," Scott said.

"Will too," Peter repeated.

^ ’ "Wanna bet?" IB

40 Twilight Zone

Mii,

WHO WERE THE MONSTERS ON THE ISLAND? AND WHAT MONSTERS HAD MADE THEM?

42 Twilight Zone

Illustrations by Jill Karla Schwarz

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful!

I, Rashid the Scribe, son of Faraj, testify that this is the true and literal account of the final voyage undertaken by Sinbad the Sailor. From the Island of False Images I release this message, trusting to God to bear it safely across the waters to some understanding mind.

efore it was known in court, the bazaars of Basra had word that the great navigator Sinbad was planning to emerge from retire- ment and embark upon another voyage. So swiftly and quietly did he advance his preparations that he was almost ready to sail by the time the news reached the Vizier, al-Afdal. It is said that with a word of command al-Afdal might halt the sun in its passage across the sky, were it not an impious act. Sinbad came to court immediately in answer to his summons.

Having made his obeisance, he listened courte- ously while the Vizier asked the purpose and destina- tion of his voyage. For of old he was wont to sail at the bidding of the great Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid.

"Truly," Sinbad replied, "I have no purpose here but my own love of adventure and new lands. I find I am ill suited for a life of ease. As for my destination, I do not wish to speak of it at this time."

Al-Afdal would not insult so great a captain by pressing for more information.

"Then go with God, Sinbad," said he, "and may He grant you favorable winds. But you may oblige me in one small thing."

"I am yours to command," said Sinbad, bow- ing.

"Take with you Rashid Ibn-Faraj, Scribe," the Vizier bade him, "so that the voyage might be com- memorated to posterity."

And so I came to be included in that com- pany.

e sailed into the south for days without number. Sinbad stood on the deck, using a glass to scour the horizon. The mate and crew were all his veterans, old companions he had rescued from poverty or summoned from the enjoy- ment of well-earned riches; one and all, they had come to him like disciples.

"Time was," whispered Husain the Weaver's Son, a grizzled sailor who befriended me, "Sinbad needed no glass to watch the sea and sky. His was the eye of the hawk, soaring high over the desert to see the twitch of a mouse's nose. So time humbles us all."

Aye, Sinbad was old. His beard was the color of snow in the Armenian hills. Yet he moved with the grace of a leopard, his voice was as clear as a brass horn, and more than once he showed his strength had not abated.

An ancient crew in an ancient ship; and no man of us knew our destination.

"Even so," I protested to the mate, Harufa Ibn-Ismail, "the captain may lead us into unknown perils."

"Trust in Allah," Harufa replied. "Is not a man's very life a voyage to an unknown port? Be still, young man."

In that company, I was young indeed.

e sailed so far south that we left the blistering sun behind and came to cooler latitudes — proof, the mate whispered to me, that the world was round. For in his youth he had sailed with Sinbad to a northern sea where ice- mountains floated on the water.

Our provisions were all but exhausted. The old men began to grow uneasy. And then one day, late in the afternoon, the lookout startled us with a throaty cry: "Land ho! Island due south!"

I ran to the bow and discerned a great rock protruding from the sea like the horn of a basking dragon. By nightfall we were anchored in a bay under the shadow of that mountain. Sinbad assem- bled us on the deck.

"The time has come, my brothers," he began, "to reveal our destination.

"This is the Island of False Images, last visited a world's age ago by the merchant captain Kedron of Tyre. The men of Phoenicia guarded the secret jealously, but in time it passed to the Greeks. The knowledge was hidden in the great library of Alex- andria, which perished in fire long before the Faith

Twilighi Zone 43

e(3x«kt ^>uii»eu:L

came to Egypt; but one account of the journey was kept in a repository in Byzantium. '

"From there it passed into the keeping of a fellowship of Christian monks in the Sinai, where it remains. I saw it many years ago, stopping over on a caravan from Damascus to Cairo, and kept all the details in my mind.

"Now we are come to this ancient place, and tomorrow we will land where no man's foot has trod for twice a thousand years."

Above us the mountain loomed like a dark tower, blotting out the stars. The waves broke sil- very on a black shore. No bird called.

"If the old writings speak the truth," said Sin- bad, "we will find here the birthplace of man."

lasphemy!" cried Harufa, and the sailors muttered their assent. "Did not God mold men from clots of blood?"

"I speak of things before man's birth," said Sinbad, "nor is it blasphemy to explore any land that God has made. Maybe the old writings are lies, which it would ease my mind to know. But Allah would not let us build ships if he did not mean us to • sail them." *

"So?" challenged Harufa, "May not a man do many things unpleasing to the sight of God?"

"Aye," Sinbad agreed, "but you have sailed with me on many voyages, Harufa; have you ever known me to offend the Lord?"

"You have followed the path of the Prophet," conceded the mate.

"Then trust me one more time," the captain

said.

r slept but ill, a prey to frightful dreams in which serpents glided silently through empty halls and foul ophidian shapes stalked obscenely through the shadows. When I awoke wearily, it was not quite dawn, but most of the crew were already astir.

"Scribe!" Harufa called. "You will be with the landing party. The captain has ordered."

Arms folded across his chest, Sinbad waited for his men to prepare the boat. His scimitar, a gift from the Caliph, was buckled to his belt. He stood erect as a general on parade, trying to peer through the forests on the shore.

"Ready, sir," Husain the Weaver's Son reported.

"Board," said the captain, "and lower away." We took our places in the boat, four of us plus Sinbad and Harufa, and were lowered gently to the waves. The sea was calm that day. We rowed easily, riding the surf until we scraped our keel upon the dark sands. We pulled the boat ashore, moored it to a tree, and made ready to explore the island.

"There are no men here," Sinbad said, "but keep your swords ready nevertheless." >

He found a path and led us into the forest, single file.

High over our heads grew strange trees with scaly bark and fleshy leaves. I looked in vain for a bird, but there were insects everywhere — gaudy scar- let butterflies, lumbering beetles the size of children's fists, tiny midges that swirled in living clouds, and great black flies that buzzed past our ears.

We walked without speaking, hands on the hilts of our weapons, craning our necks to see the exotic foliage. Sinbad led, taking firm and even strides; Harufa guarded the rear with a drawn sword. Husain's turban bobbed in front of me. He was getting on in years, his leg pained him, and he walked with a crooked gait. Yet he had strength in his arms to lift me off my feet.

The path led upward, and as we followed it the woods thinned and the ground became hard and rocky. We emerged from the forest onto a bleak plateau.

Before us lay a marvelous sight.

"Behold," said Sinbad, "the first of the images."

We approached cautiously. I have seen the ruins of Babylon, and sketched pagan idols in the mountains of Elam, but this colossus dwarfed them.

It was hewn from black stone, black and hard as the sacred stone in the holy Ka'aba, carved with rude but masterly strokes. Time had obliterated much of it, but I could see it was not meant to rep- resent a man.

" 'Tis a jinn!" whispered Husain.

"I know not what it is," spoke our captain, "but it is not a jinn. See, there is writing here."

I looked at it closely. I can read the Greek, Latin, and Armenian scripts, but this was something alien. The glyphs flowed together like a brood of snakes and seemed to writhe across the stone.

"I cannot read it," I admitted.

"If no men live here," Harufa wondered, "then who raised this monstrosity and wrote this unknown script?"

"According to the scroll I read," Sinbad replied, "the precursors of men."

"Wullah!" the mate snorted. "Will you tell us a camel wrote it, then? Be guided by the Prophet; before men, there were only animals, jinns, angels, and devils."

"It is Satan's work!" muttered a sailor, Habib al-Djekr. The others glanced about fearfully, but we were alone 'on the plateau.

"Peace, Habib!" Sinbad soothed him. "Trust in Allah. He is everywhere."

e continued to march inland, but I paid scant attention to the route. I was trying to resolve a difficult question.

Presuming the old Phoenician reports were true — indeed, they had guided us here, where no man had journeyed for twice a thousand years — who had raised up that monument? The images were here when Kedron came, but no men. So either

44 Twilight Zone

As we

approached the town, its alien nature became apparent.

men had lived here and departed long before the Tyrians arrived, or the images had been carved and set in place by other than human hands.

I came to no conclusion, but the effort left me considerably unnerved. And so, I judged by their faces, were my companions. We advanced timorous- ly, as gazelles approaching a water hole where hunters were known to lie in wait.

Only Sinbad marched with confidence, his aged shoulders straight.

e came next to a line of three images upon a platform of black basalt; and even this hardest of rock was noticeably weathered. The base of the platform was covered with inscriptions.

“Captain," spoke an old one-eyed sailor, Shirkuh of Kurdistan, "let us go back to the ship. This is an unholy place."

Sinbad looked at him with compassion.

"Have we not been in unholy places in our time, Shirkuh?" he asked. "Have we not pillaged the nest of the roc and entered the lairs of dragons?"

"He is right. Captain!" Husain spoke up. "Did the scrolls you studied say nothing of the nature of these images? What are they? Maybe if we knew that, we would be bolder."

"Maybe if you knew," countered Sinbad, "you would turn and flee like mice!" He smiled, showing all his white teeth, and his dark eyes twinkled. "In truth, the meaning of these monuments is not known."

"Then why," I ventured, "did the Phoenicians believe them to be the work of man's precursors?"

"It would be well to tell us everything, sir," added Harufa. "We shall not fail you."

Sinbad paused, contemplating the three monoliths. Each stood taller than a camel's hump.

"I have told you most of it already," he said at last. "Kedron encountered no living thing on this island, save the little wild creatures of the forest. Yet in the center of the island, on the floor of an ancient volcanic crater, he found a deserted city, which he explored somewhat. The dimensions of the buildings, he reported, were such as would not ac- commodate any race of men; and they were incon- ceivably old, older than the pyramids. Kedron was a great traveler, and not likely to be deceived. From the appearance of the city, he reasoned that it could not have been a home for men like us.

"He would have explored further, but his men lost their courage and mutinied. He had to depart the island, leaving its mysteries intact.

"Now this was long ago, before the Prophet

revealed the word of God. The faithful may walk where infidels fear to tread, knowing that Allah has assigned to every man his fate. Or do I overestimate your hardihood?"

"No!" we shouted with one voice.

"Lead us to the city," said Harufa, "for the glory of God."

We reached the lip of the crater by noon, and beheld the nameless city nesting amid the rocks. From our distance it seemed like any other ruin. But no vestiges of roads radiated from that labyrinth of stone; it was as if the hand of a jinn had dropped it from the sky into the midst of the crater.

We descended, cinders crunching under our boots. As we approached the town, its alien nature became apparent. Something was wrong with the city's geometry; we saw hollow doors and windows positioned at dubious angles, and streets tilting drunkenly to one side, as if thrown off the level by an earthquake.

There were tall buildings, and massive, but without grace. All were made of heavy blocks of basalt, rough-hewn, fitted together with no sign of mortar, so closely that a man might not insert a dag- ger blade between the cracks.

“Wullah!" exclaimed Shirkuh. "See how the streets rise and disappear!"

"It is a trick of the eye," said Sinbad, "as when one dips a rod into a pool of clear water and the rod appears to bend. Do not be afraid."

"But those buildings!" cried Habib al-Djekr. "Why do they not fajl down?"

There is a tower in India, they say, that leans unnaturally, like a spear thrust into damp sand. I have never seen it, but it is said to have stood for many years. I wonder if it leans like the structures in this nameless city.

"I know not," admitted Sinbad, "but if they have stood like this since Kedron's day, they will stand a little longer. They will not fall on us."

There were doors — I believe they were doors — sunk halfway into the street, and others raised several feet above it. One could not enter a building without climbing, standing on a comrade's shoul- ders, stooping, or crawling on one's belly. Now 1 understood why the Phoenicians had ascribed the work to nothing human.

"Come," said Sinbad. "The building that I seek is in the middle of the city."

And he led us over the tilted streets.

The great pile of basalt was wider at the roof than at the base, like an inverted pyramid, and capped by a dome of green gneiss that seemed to turn, in upon itself. No man can describe the streets that led to it. At times we seemed like flies walking on a wall, but were not conscious of any effort of climbing. Yet at last we stood before the structure that the captain said was called a tem- ple by the Phoenicians.

Twilight Zone 45

"A temple," put in Harufa, "to, the Devil, not to God."

"We will go inside," said Sinbad. "Draw your swords."

"But Captain!" Husain protested. "Was it not written that this city is uninhabited by man or beast? Whom have we to draw our swords against?"

But this question he would not answer.

We found a high, narrow door set above the street, about the height of a man's knee. Sinbad, the blade of his scimitar glittering, was the first to climb into the shadows, Harufa following. Shirkuh and Habib remained outside to guard — against what, none could say. They looked like condemned men await- ing the executioner.

By the time I crept through the door and tip- toed down a steep ramp to a wide floor, they were already lighting the torches Harufa carried in his pack. The pitch that saturated the wood sputtered as the flames grew bright, illuminating the vast hall in which we found ourselves.

“Wullah!" Husain muttered. "I feel like the Prophet Jonah in the belly of the whale!"

It was not like standing in any hall in the world of- men, not even the great church of Hagia Sophia in Byzantium of the Greeks. We could not see the ceiling, and the angle of the floor made one dizzy. Husain's observation had been to the point.

A short distance away a group of images stood in the middle of the floor like a council of frozen, misshapen giants.

"Let us study them," said Sinbad.

Within the temple — if temple it was— the im- ages were protected from the wind and rain. No ero- sion had erased the hideous details of their features.

Husain began to pray.

As for me, I examined the monuments with an unwilling fascination. There was a deadly beauty to them, like the iridescent sheen of a scorpion's ar- mor. I could not lear my eyes away.

They were the effigies of creatures that might infest the blackest bowels of hell, beings that will stalk my nightmares forever. In form they were like serpents — but no serpents that ever saw the light of day. They stood erect like men, with their tails coiled around their squat, stumpy legs; and they had hands like lizards, ending in curved claws. Their heads were round in the back, with long faces taper- ing to flattened points, and expressionless eyes set on either side — reptiles' eyes.

The group was assembled around a cyclopean table or altar. On it, taking shape under their hands, was the form of a man. It was incomplete; it had no face.

"Captain!"

Harufa's cry broke the spell. I turned to look. Sinbad had collapsed into the mate's arms, his body quivering like a dead leaf in the wind; his jaw slack.

"Water! Hurry!"

Husain uncapped the waterskin and splashed

the captain's face. Sinbad shook his head, took a deep breath, and regained his feet. Yet now he looked his age.

"So it was true." He sighed. "Cursed be the day I saw that scroll! For I read that the creatures were depicted in the act of making a man, and it haunted me all my days till now."

"But only God can make a man," Husain, in his simple faith, pointed out. "These images are blasphemy, nothing more."

"Aye," agreed Harufa, "there is no authority here. Are we to believe the Prophet, or the stone- work of nameless infidels?"

Sinbad looked at me and I turned away, understanding his despair. For men had not built this city, nor had men sculpted this group of statues. They had not been meant for human eyes. The art was monstrous, yet in all likelihood it depicted an event in history.

May Allah forgive me that thought!

"Have you marked well what you see here, Rashid?"

I could only nod my head.

"Are you prepared to tell of it in the Caliph's court?"

"Captain," I replied, "they would strike off my head for uttering such a blasphemy."

"As well they should," he muttered.

e climbed back out to the street. Before we sailed from the island, we knew we must find water. Then the long journey back to Basra and Baghdad.

"Wullah, Captain!" cried Habib when Sinbad emerged from the door. "Why tarried you so long? See, it is almost dark!"

We looked up in wonder. The new moon had risen, and the stars were beginning to peek through the dusky sky.

"What!" growled Harufa. "We were only within the temple for a few minutes."

"In the name of God," swore Shirkuh, "you passed the better part of the day in there! See, the sun has set."

It was true. The silver disc of the full moon already shone in the darkling sky. We all looked up and marveled at it.

Then Sinbad grew grim; his eyes were like iron, the muscles on his neck like cords of brass. I almost feared him then; but presently he smiled like a man who sees through a juggler's trick, and the strength and vigor flowed back into his body.

"Return with me inside," he commanded, "all of you."

Utterly confused, we followed him into the temple and relit the torches. Shadows hid the details of the images from Habib and Shirkuh, who were not inclined to examine them more closely.

Sinbad silenced all our qciestions.

"Be still," he said, "and wait. K?ep your

46 Twilight Zone

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weapons ready. We may be called upon to battle for the Faith. Wullah! There is Satan's mark on this place. But I begin to understand."

So we waited — for how long, none of us could say. Within that accursed temple time danced to a different measure.

No noise intruded from the streets of the dead city. The torches crackled like bonfires, then burned low. Sinbad ordered them extinguished, plunging the chamber into darkness.

My companions were all around me, yet I felt alone with my thoughts. Sinbad was waiting for something; but however 1 taxed my poor store of wisdom, I could not think what it was. The trick of time seemed to have sparked some intuition in him. For me it inspired only fear and wonderment.

Outside the moon rose — or was something else the source of the pale, cold light that flowed into that unhallowed crypt? One could not be sure. But the light crept past us like a lazy tide, and rested on that hideous statuary The huge reptilian forms were grey, but the faceless human figure glimmered a leprous white.

"There!" Sinbad whispered harshly, pointing with his blade. We could see each other now. "Behold!"

Allah have mercy. The monuments stirred.

One by one, the great stone heads pivoted si- lently on their bulky necks. A coiled tail slid from a pair of colossal ankles and snaked slowly across the floor. A pair of massive talons flexed, like the hands of an old man warming to a fire.

The human figure on the table twitched like a

grub.

Like monstrous crabs, the claws of the ophid- ian giants moved deftly and obscenely over the white stone that was like naked flesh, molding it like clay. We watched as birds enthralled by the cobra's dance. But for the strained beating of our hearts, the chamber was silent.

Stone talons settled on the round white head and began to mold a face.

"See!" Sinbad muttered. "They fashion a man, or the semblance of a man."

He rubbed a callused thumb along the edge of his scimitar.

"With this sword, I have slain a roc and defied the walking dead. It was forged in Damascus of finest steel and blessed by a holy imam. Now I will test it once again."

He stepped boldly out of the concealing shadows and bellowed the war cry of the Faith: “Allah akbar!" His courage drew us with him; even I, Rashid the Scribe, gripped the unfamiliar cutlass in my soft scribe's hands and bellowed with the rest. The ancient hall resounded with our cries.

The great reptilian shapes continued with their work, unheeding. Our challenges died on our lips.

"For the love of God, Captain!" cried Harufa.

How shall 1 express what I saw then? The human figure had a face, but it was not a human face. It was that of a serpent.

The light grew stronger. We saw everything clearly. The human body on the slab was perfect in every respect, but for cold and lifeless skin— and the flat, wide-mouthed face that seemed to be the face of an asp. By the power of Satan, it moved. The lipless mouth gaped open, revealing fangs and a split tongue. We stood in our little group like foolish beg- gars in the Caliph's court, uncomprehending and afraid.

The stone demons paused in their work, as if to admire its completion. The horror on the slab rose to a sitting posture. The wan light of the chamber danced in its cold, lidless eyes. And it looked at us.

"There is no God but God!" sobbed Husain the Weaver's Son. "Captain, let us destroy this blasphemy!"

Sinbad stood in silence, a man bemused. Every one of his long, hard years seemed stamped upon his face. Yet an inner flame flickered in his eyes, and his hands on his sword did not shake.

"An age might pass in the world," he said, perhaps to himself, "while here a little hour or two trickled by. Here yesterday becomes tomorrow, and today a thousand years hence."

We understood nothing, even as his voice rose and filled the chamber: "You were wrong, O Kedron! God's will be done!"

His men cried out again, imbued with the spirit of jihad; or maybe the unholy thing they saw aroused such terror as could only be endured by assailing its source, even as a cornered hare will leap at a hunting cheetah. They were old men, and time pressed on them like heavy cloaks of earth; but when Sinbad lifted his sword, they followed him. Only I, the youngest, hung back. My shame was great; it burned my soul like molten glass. Yet some greater power held me motionless.

One of the stone giants turned from its work, the huge head pivoting ponderously upon its shoul- ders like the great gate of Antioch upon its hinge. The stone jaws creaked open. Sinbad halted, his men behind him; they stood like children before a wrath- .a

Twilight Zone 47

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ful father, looking up in awe.

On the slab the half-formed manlike thing gazed down at us in silence. Then its lipless mouth split into a grin — the grin of a basking crocodile. Its forked tongue flickered obscenely toward us. I, who have seen an asp taste the air around a fear-beguiled quail, would have averted my eyes; but like the quail, I was fettered by what they beheld.

The creature stirred its cold white limbs, as if to descend from the slab; and it seemed my shudder- ing flesh could feel already its devouring fangs.

But the blessing on the sword gave strength to Sinbad's arms, and like a falcon mounting the wind, he rose above the horror's spell. Gripping the sword in both hands high over his head, he advanced and brought it down. The holy blade struck a shower of sparks from a white thigh stretched over the edge of the slab. It rose and fell like a smith's hammer until suddenly it shattered. But by then the hellish crea- ture was a jumble of white fragments.

Harufa came after his captain, and thrust his blade into the side of an ophidian giant. It passed easily through the stone, if stoqe it was, stopping at 'the hilt. I Beard, above me, a sharp hiss, as of escap- ing steam. From the open jaws of the first giant a red mist was issuing, filling the chamber like a fog of blood. Husain coughed loudly and clutched at his chest; his sciiriitar fell from his nerveless hands, clat- tering on the rocky floor.

One of the behemoths reached out and tried to mold the white creature's asplike head; but there was nothing there to mold.

And now the stone gods seemed to fill my eyes, standing taller than mountains. Around them, like drunken pygmies, staggered the men, blinded and choking. Other stone jaws parted, and the mist grew thicker, like a destroying cloud of locusts. No longer did the stone giants move; yet they spewed out death, like erupting volcanoes. There was a roaring in my ears, as of mighty waters.

I fell into a black pit where there was neither sight nor sound.

ain plucked me from my trance. My lungs ached, and my mouth was as dry as parch- ment. My skull throbbed with the beating of my heart as I struggled to sit up.

The monuments were lifeless rock, even as before. The handle of Harufa'S sword protruded stiffly from a giant's unfeeling side.

Somehow I found the strength to clamber to my feet.

The floor of the chamber was strewn with the bodies of my friends, mere dry and lifeless husks. They were as dead leaves flung down by the wind: ancient Husain with dried blood in his white beard, old Shirkuh with his turban unbound and coiled about his shoulders like the cerements of the grave. And the others, the aged heroes — deserted by their

Its lipless mouth split into a grin — the grin of a basking crocodile.

strength, but not by God, For surely they had died as ghazis, swords raised against the enemies of Allah.

A gasp of pain broke the silence of that dark place. I crept forward and found Sinbad, dying. He lay at the foot of the stone table, his body drained of vigor; but his eyes gleamed like bright jewels in the hilt of the Caliph's sword. I knelt and cradled his head, restraining my tears. He was like the ruin of some great palace swept by desert sands, one poor pillar still evoking memories of majesty and pomp.

"My course is nearly run, my friend," he panted.

"What were they. Captain?"

"I had taken them for the past," he whispered faintly, "but that was a snare and a delusion. What they shaped was not for the beginning, but the end. Praise be to Allah!"

' "The end?" I cried. "The end of what?" But it seemed he could not hear me.

So perished Sinbad, noblest of men. May Allah welcome his soul to Paradise.

Wearily I eased his head to the floor and stood up. The horror on the slab, sundered into fragments by Sinbad's blade, lay in broken disarray, the work of twice a thousand years undone.

There is little else to tell. I came forth from the temple, and it was day — what day, I know not. Dazed, I stumbled through the mad streets until I was free of the city.

I know not for how long I wandered. My thoughts were a tortured maze. They grappled with the horror I had seen unveiled. What was begun once might begin again. What was shaped once might be shaped anew.

I am only a scribe. I can only tell what I saw. Let wiser men pronounce upon its meanings. Let them send a fleet of warriors, well armed.

I wandered long, unheeding night or day. And at length I returned to the beach under the mountain.

The ship had sailed.

Nearby I found the rotting fragments of the

boat.

May Allah sustain me. 10

48 Twilight Zone

A PSYCHOTIC ASSASSIN STALKS THE PRESIDENT'S NIGHTMARES IN THE LATEST OF THE RECENT CROP OF INWARD-LOOKING SF FILMS.

JAMES VERNIERE REPORTS.

ver since the first primitive human realized that he went "somewhere else" while his body slept, people have been fascinated by the undiscovered land that exists in our dreams. For some — the aborigines of Australia, for example, and the Senoi of Malaysia — dream life is as significant and real as waking life. In fact, the Senoi encourage their children to confront the beasts of their dreams, to fight them, and to defeat them — no doubt familiar advice to Westerners who have spent their hard-earned money on the analyst's couch, yet still a testament to the universal significance of dreams.

It is this frightening but seductive world of dreams that is the setting for much of the action in Joe Ruben's aptly titled Dreamscape. A moderately budgeted science fiction film that appears to have some themes in common with Brainstorm and The Dead Zone ("We'd like to put a little distance between us," says director Ruben), Dreamscape is the story of a psychic named Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid of The Right Stuff) who— with the aid of a dream-linking device — can enter into the dreams of others and finds himself involved in a bizarre plot to assassinate the President of the United States while he dreams.

But this dream-death will also be a real one, for in Dreamscape the old wives' tale is true: If you die in your dreams, you die in real life from the shock of it. And in Dreamscape this "dream murder" becomes a potential perfect crime.

Despite the formulaic nature of the plot, involving idealistic scientists whose discovery is put to twisted purpose by nefarious government cigencies, Dreamscape boasts a unique combination of cast and crew.

1. The President of the United States (Eddie Aibert, who ironicaily costarred with Ronaid Reagan in the 1938 fiim Brother Rat) teiis the sinister Blair (Christopher Plummer), head of a covert government agency, of his recurring nightmares.

2. Dr. Novotny (Max Von Sydow), head of the experi- mental dream laboratory, gazes at psychic Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid of The Right Stuff) as he “dream-links” with one of Novotny’s troubled patients.

3. Gardner enters the hair-raising nightmare of an Iron worker plagued by a fear of falling.

4. Gardner grapples with the Snake Man, a figure from the recurring nightmare of a tormented boy who will die if he doesn't con- front the terror of his

i

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Warner Bros.

JAMES VERNIERE TALKS TO A DREAMSCAPE STAR WHO'LL SOON BE PLAYING OPPOSITE

EDDIE MURPHY, DUDLEY MOORE, AND HARRISON FORD.

When opportunity knocked on Kate Copshow's door. It come in the form of E.T. director Steven Spielberg, who cost the young actress os the new girlfriend of America's favorite whip-toting ar- chaeologist In the soorvto-be released sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Cap- shaw will play a feisty singer-dancer named Willy Scott opposite Harrison Ford in /nd/ono Jones and the Temple of Doom, whose plot Is, as usual, cloaked in 'secrecy. "I've been told to tell you roth- Ing," says Capshaw, as we sit in the Madison Avenue office of her publicist.

For Capshaw, the plum part means Instant Internatbnal recognition— arvd so does her forthcoming appearance in Par- amount's The Best Defense, starring Eddie Murphy and Dudley Moore. Yes, she has already garnered high praise for her performance In her first feature film, A Lit- tle Sex. But her second and third films— Armyan Berstein's Windy City and Joe Ruben's Dreamscape— have not even been released, so being cast in Indiana Jones has been a dream come true.

Yet despite the fairy tale quality of the casting, working on the Raiders se- quel has been something of a trial. When Capshaw arrives for our inferview, her btond nnop of curls still wet from the shower, she looks exhausted. Dark circles rx)t quite covered by makeup ring her eyes, and her left eye looks downright black and blue. "So you noticed,'' she says. "It happened on location in Sri Lanka. I got hit in the eye with the prop stick. I'll tell you, there hasn't been a day on this film that I haven't had a bruise or a sprain of some sort."

What becomes of Koren Allen's character in Indiana JonesR I wonder aloud. "Let's get this straight," says Cap- shaw, dead sertously. "I'm rxDt replacing her. This is a completely new adventure that takes place earlier in the story."

How Kate Capshaw got the part in the first place Is a study in the art of risk- « taking. The first risk she took was giving | up her life in Columbta, Missouri, where J she worked as a schoolteacher and lived 1 with her husband (a high school prirv | cipal) and her young daughter. "Every- s thing in my life was slated for pure hap- °

piness, and yet I felt unfulfilled," says Capshaw. "I lived in a nice house on a nice street. I had a nice job and a nice family, but I didn't feel challenged."

So Capshaw and her family moved from Missouri to New York City, where she was to pursue a career as a model ^ while her husband sought work as a stockbroker. To the skeptical, modeling seems hardly the career for a twenty- four-year-old mother with a master's degree in special education. But Cap- shaw Is rvDthing if not Fortuf^e's darling. The marriage failed, but the day she walked into the Ford Agency, she was signed up. "It was a disappointing expe- rience, though, because I wanted the cover of Vogue, but all I got were the J.C. Penney catalogues. I felt like I had failed."

So Capshaw went from modeling to televiston, where she appeared as ev- erything from the Faberge girl, to the housewife hawking WIndex, to the sultry siren draped across a Toyota.

From commercials she moved on to daytime soaps, appearing in an eight- week stint on The Edge of Night as a dying actress named Jinx Avery, "From the first day I was dying, dying, dying, but nobody knew what I was dying from becouse the character always looked great. Every once in a while they had me faint."

With the commercials and a soap behind her. It was retatively easy for this beautiful blonde to break into films. She ptayed the girl who got away In A Little Sex and Windy City, and a scientist who specralizes in dream therapy in Dream- scape. As for her role in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Steven Spielberg told her that giving her the part was the smartest thing he ever did.

"But I don't know whether he means in his life or just in this movie," says Capshaw.

5. With the help of Gardner, a man suffering from sex- ual dysfunction faces the unfaith- ful wife of his dreams.

6. Tommy Roy Glatmon (David Patrick Kelly), who's both psy- chic and psychot- ic, threatens to kill Gardner when pressed about the nature of his secret work for Blair.

7. Makeup expert Craig Reardon (creator of the Gremlin In Twilight Zone— The Movie) adjusts one of the Snake Man suits worn by Kelly.

8. A dream comes true for Gardner and Dr. Jane De Vries (Kate Cap- show), a member of the experimen- tal "dream team."

Capshaw In Windy City (top left) and, as Willie Scott (below), with Har- rison Ford In In- diana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

52 Twilight Zone

DREAMSCAPE

Costarring with Quaid are Kate Capshaw (costar of the forthcoming Raiders of the Lost Ark sequel) as Dr. Jane De Vries, a member of the experimental "dream team"; Max Von Sydow as Dr. Paul Novotny, head of the dream-link project; Christopher Plummer (Murder by Decree, Eyewitness. Silent Partner) as Blair, a menacing government agent; and Eddie Albert as the President of the United States, a man tormented by a recurring nightmare about nuclear war.

The design of the Snake Man is the work of special makeup effects expert Craig Reardon, whose previous credits include Twilight Zone— The Movie (he created Dan Aykroyd's monster makeup and the Gremlin for the Miller segment). Poltergeist (the "crawling steak," the decomposing face, and the animated corpses — one of which is now featured in Billy Idol's video, "Dancing with Myself," directed by Tobe Hooper), and Strange Behavior. "I was still working on the Twilight Zone movie when I was hired to do Dreamscape," says Reardon. "My job was to create the three different Snake Man designs and to build heads for the 'replacement animation' sequences." Reardon admits that he can't be sure how his work will show up on the screen until he's seen the final film, but he also supplied twelve "nuked" corpses for the "dream subway" scene, six deformed children, and two mutant dog "suits" which had to be discarded when the trained dogs wouldn't wear them.

Dreamscape's technical credits are impressive, but one X factor remains: director Joe Ruben, whose previous credits do little to reveal whether or not he has a flair for genre filmmaking. A graduate of the University of Michigan, where he studied film, Ruben has extensive television credits and began working as a director for Crown International for whom he made two films. The Sister-in-Law and Pom Pom Girls. More recently, Ruben worked for AlP, where he directed Joyride, Our Winning Season, and Gorp. His most recent effort was the pilot for the ABC adaptation of Breaking Away.

Twilight Zone 53

9. In the final confrontation, Glatman, Gardner, and the President of the United States enter Into the President's nightmare vision of post- atomic holocaust America— In this cose, a subway full of "nuked" corpses, to. The Infantile but lethal Glatman transforms himself Into a ninja and menaces the President with a pair of bladed nunchakus.

11. Arrother manifestation of the Snake Man, this one a product of Glatman’s warped psyche, moves In for the kill In the film's climactic final scenes.

DREAMSCAPE

Although dreams have figured prominently in many films, from the expressionistic visions in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to the simplistic, "paint by numbers" dream in Still of the Night, Ruben has not been influenced by the dream imagery of his predecessors. "I didn't think in terms of other movies," he says. "The dreams in this film are very structured.

We shot them to look superrealistic, to get a sense of a heightened state."

The superrealism of Dreamscape will not, however, include any nudity or excessive gore (the film straddles the fence between PG and R right now), despite the fact that the most memorable dreams are frequently chock full of sex and violence. What, then will the dreams of Dreamscape reveal to us? Will they depict a world full of Jungian archetypes or a bizarre gallery of Freudian sexual innuendoes? Will they offer retreads of old Twilight Zones! Or will Dreamscape give us just another Heavy Concept that is nothing more than an excuse for gratuitous special effects? You'll see the answer soon at your local theater. Who knows?

With a little luck, Dreamscape may turn out to be one of 1984's biggest sleepers. IQ

Illustrations by Randy Jorges

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M''"' ’

IT WAS EASY TO REACH PARADISE. ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS CLOSE YOUR EYES AND PUCKER UP,

# t was the thousandth day. He had started in m September of 1952, and here it was, June of '55. He had counted the days, making tiny checks on a piece of paper he kept in his wallet.

A thousand days in love with Marilyn Taylor.

For the thousandth time he slipped the cover over his adding machine, plucked off his cellophane cuffs, and locked up his desk. He was in the office

Twilight Zone 55

^hr^er ^uss

but he was really in Hollywood imnfersed in a fan- cy, wallowing in cinemascopic delights. Instinct alone put the coat over his sparse frame, the panama on his semi-bald skull. Habit took him to the elevator, out the main door of the Lane Building, and down the steps into the steamy dimness of the subway, where he was shoe-horned into the heat- laden train by a horde of nine-to- fivers. He hardly felt the bony elbows, though, the grunts of agony, the snarled complaints.

Henry Shrivel was dreaming.

The thousandth day. That was a record. Never had such love been so faithful, he thought as he swayed with the motion of the train. Sweat dripped off his face as he thought of her.

Then, two stations after he'd gotten on, the mass of people wedged him further into the car. He grabbed a vacant strap and slipped back into reverie. The train was halfway across the bridge before his eyes lighted on the advertisement at his left. His mouth popped open, his pale blue eyes grew wide.

It was Her. ^

She was standing on a tennis court smiling fondly at a cigarette which she held in the V of her two shapely fingers. Her eyes peered into Henry Shrivel's soul.

"Charnel Cigarettes," she was commenting, "are milder and tastier. They are my brand." Signed: "Marilyn Taylor, Classic Studios. Now appearing in The Karamazov Boys."

Henry Shrivel gazed adoringly at her. Her hair was blond and fluffy. Her eyes were cat green, sultry, inviting him to blood-curdling pleasures. Her scarlet lips implored to be taken.

The illustration was cut off where the line of her shoulders began the inexorable slope into her internationally famed bosom. Hollywood's most lav- ish bust; the columnists had voted her that signal horior. And, oh, 'tis true, 'tis true, thought Henry Shrivel as he hung glassy-eyed from the subway strap.

All the way home he watched her standing on the tennis court, cool, unruffled, frozen in beauty. "Marilyn is quite the tennis