The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (34 page)

Mr. Finchley’s left eyebrow shot up. “I’ll answer
that
burning question after you tell me what’s wrong with that electronic boo-boo, and also acquaint me with how much this current larceny is going to cost me.”

The repairman rose and wiped his hands with a rag. He looked down at the set, then up to Mr. Finchley. “Two hours’ labor,” he said, “a broken set of tubes, new oscillator, new filter.”

Mr. Finchley’s face froze, his thin lips forming a taut line.

“How very technical,” he announced. “How very nice! And I presume I’m to be dunned once again for three times the worth of the bloody thing?”

The repairman smiled gently and studied Mr. Finchley. “Last time I was here, Mr. Finchley,” he said, “you’d kicked your foot through the screen. Remember?”

Mr. Finchley turned away and put a cigarette in a holder. “I have a vivid recollection,” he announced. “It was not working properly.” He shrugged. “I tried to get it to do so in a normal fashion!”

“By kicking your foot through the screen?” the repairman shook his head. “Why didn’t you just horsewhip it, Mr. Finchley? That’d show it who’s boss.”

He started to collect his tools and put them into the box. Mr. Finchley lit the cigarette in the holder, took a deep drag, and examined his nails.

“What do you say we cease this small talk and get down to some serious larceny? You can read me off the damages...though I sometimes wonder exactly what is the purpose of the Better Business Bureau when they allow you itinerant extortionists to come back week after week, move wires around, busily probe with ham-like hands, and accomplish nothing but the financial ruin of every customer on your route!”

The repairman looked up from the tool box, his smile fading. “We’re not a gyp outfit, Mr. Finchley We’re legitimate repairmen. But I’ll tell you something about
yourself
—”

“Spare me, please,” Mr. Finchley interrupted him. “I’m sure there must be some undernourished analyst with an aging mother to care for whom I can contact for that purpose.”

The repairman closed the box and stood up. “Why don’t you hear me out, Mr. Finchley? That set doesn’t work because obviously you got back there and yanked out wires and God knows what else! You had me over here last month to fix your portable radio—because you’d thrown it down the steps.”

“It did not work properly,” Finchley said icily.

“That’s the point, Mr. Finchley. Why don’t they work properly? Off-hand I’d say it’s because you don’t treat them properly.”

Mr. Finchley let the cigarette holder dangle from his mouth as he surveyed the repairman much as a scientist would look at a bug through a microscope. “I assume there’s no charge for that analysis?” he inquired.

The repairman shook his head. “What does go wrong with these things, Mr. Finchley? Have you any idea?”

Mr. Finchley let out a short, frozen chortle. “Have I any idea? Now that’s worth a scholarly ten lines in your Repairman’s Journal! Bilk the customer, but let him do the repairing!”

“The reason I asked that,” the repairman persisted, “is because whatever it is that really bothers you about that television set and the radio...you’re not telling me.”

He waited for a response. Mr. Finchley turned his back.

“Well?” the repairman asked.

Finchley drew a deep breath as if the last resisting pocket of his patience had been overrun and was being forced to capitulate. “Aside from being rather an incompetent clod,” Finchley announced, turning back toward the repairman, ‘you’re a most insensitive man. I’ve explained to you already. The television set simply did not work properly. And that rinky-dink original Marconi operating under the guise of a legitimate radio gave me nothing but static.”

The TV repairman flicked the set on, watched the picture, raised and lowered the volume, then shut it off. He turned toward Finchley. “You’re sure that’s all that was wrong with it?”

Finchley made a gesture and started out of the room. The repairman, with a smile, followed him.

“I’ll send you a bill, Mr. Finchley,” he said as they walked toward the front hall.

“Of this I have no doubt,” Finchley responded.

At the front door, the repairman turned to look once again at Finchley, who stood on the first step of the long sweeping stairway which led to the second floor.

“Mr. Finchley...what is it with you and machines?”

Finchley’s eyes sought the ceiling as if this latest idiocy was more than he could bear. “I will file
that
idiotic question in my memorabilia to be referred to at some future date when I write my memoirs. You will fill one entire chapter on The Most Forgettable Person I Have Ever Met!”

The repairman shook his head and left. Mr. Finchley stood stock-still, his features working. For just one, single, fleeting moment, his hauteur, his pre-emptive mastery of all situations, his snobbery seemed to desert his face, leaving behind a mask of absolute, undiluted terror.

“It just so happens, you boob,” Finchley called out into the empty hall, his voice shaking, “it just so happens that every machine in my house is—”

He cut himself off abruptly, closed his eyes, shook his head, looked down at his hands, which were shaking, grabbed them together, then turned and walked unsteadily into the living room. A clock on the mantelpiece chimed deep, resonant notes that filled the room.

“All right,” Finchley said, holding his voice down, “that’ll be about enough of that! Hear me?”

The clock continued to chime. Finchley walked over toward the mantel and shouted.

“I said that’ll be just about enough of that!”

He reached up, grabbed the clock in both hands, ripped the plug out of the wall, and slammed the clock down on the floor, stamping on it with his foot while the chimes continued to blare at him like the death rattle of some dying beast. It took several moments for the chimes to die out. Finchley stood over the wreckage of broken glass and dismembered fly wheels and springs, sweat pouring down his face, his whole body shaking as if with an ague. Then very slowly he recovered composure. The shaking stopped, and he went upstairs to his bedroom.

He closed the door and lay down on the bed, feeling limp, washed out and desperately vulnerable. Soon he fell into an uneasy, twisting and turning, dream-filled sleep, full of all the nightmares that he lived with during the day and that were kept hidden underneath the icy facade of superiority which insulated him from the world.

Mr. Bartlett Finchley at age forty-two was a practicing sophisticate who wrote very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He was a bachelor and a recluse. He had few friends—only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He had no interests—save whatever current annoyance he could put his mind to. He had no purpose to his life—except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhorred.

In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley was a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century—he was unsure which. The only thing he was certain of as he awoke, drenched with perspiration, from his nap, was that the secret could not be held much longer. The sleepless nights and fear-filled days were telling on him, and this man with no friends and no confidants realized in a hidden portion of his mind that he urgently required both.

Late that afternoon he walked down the sweeping staircase from his sumptuous bedroom, attired in a smoking jacket, and directed himself to the small study off the living room where he could hear the sound of the electric typewriter. His secretary had come in a few hours before and was sitting at the desk typing from Finchley’s notes.

Edith Rogers was an attractive thirty-year-old who had been with Finchley for over a year. In a history of some two dozen-odd secretaries, Miss Rogers held the record for tenure. It was rare that anyone stayed with Mr. Finchley for over a month. She looked up as the master entered the room, cigarette in holder, holder dangling from mouth. He looked back insouciantly and walked behind her to stare over her shoulder at the page in the typewriter. He then picked up a stack of papers from the desk.

“This is all you’ve done?” he inquired coldly.

She met his stare, unyielding. “That’s all I’ve done,” she announced. “That’s forty pages in three and a half hours. That’s the best I can do, Mr. Finchley.”

He waggled a finger at the typewriter. “It’s that...that idiotic gadget of yours. Thomas Jefferson wrote out the preamble to the Constitution with a feather quill and it took him half a day.”

The secretary turned in her chair and looked directly up into his face. “Why don’t you hire Mr. Jefferson?” she said quietly.

Finchley’s eyebrow, which was one of the most mobile features in a mobile face, shot up alarmingly. “Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “with what degree of distaste I view insubordination?”

Edith Rogers bent over the typewriter. “Often and endlessly,” she said. Then she straightened up. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Finchley,” she said, rising and reaching for her bag, “you get yourself another girl, somebody with three arms and with roughly the sensitivity of an alligator. Then you can work together till death do you part. As for me—” she shut her pocketbook “—I’ve had it!”

“And you are going where?” Finchley asked her as she started into the living room.

“Where?” the girl answered, turning toward him. “I think I might take in Bermuda for a couple of weeks. Or Mexico City. Or perhaps a quiet sanitarium on the banks of the Hudson. Any place,” she continued, as she walked across the room toward the hall, “where I can be away from the highly articulate, oh so sophisticated,
bon vivant
of America’s winers and diners—Mr. Bartlett Finchley.”

She paused for breath in the hall and found him staring at her from the living room.

“You’ve even got me talking like you,” she said angrily. “But I’ll tell you what you
won’t
get me to do. You won’t turn me into a female Finchley with a pinched little acorn for a heart and a mean, petty, jaundiced view of everybody else in the world!”

Finchley’s instinct conjured up a tart, biting, cutting, and irreproachable reply, but something else deep inside shut it off. He stood for a moment with his mouth open, then he bit his lip and said very quietly in a tone she was quite unfamiliar with, “Miss Rogers...please don’t leave.”

She noticed something in his face that she had never seen before. It was an unfrocked, naked fear so unlike him as to be unbelievable. “I beg your pardon? she asked very softly.

Finchley turned away, embarrassed. “I do wish you’d...you’d stay for a little bit.” He waved an arm in the general direction of the study. “I don’t mean for work. All that can wait. I was just thinking...well...we could have dinner or something, or perhaps a cocktail.” He turned to her expectantly.

“I’m not very hungry,” she said after a pause. “And it’s too early for cocktails.” She saw the disappointment cross his face. “What’s your trouble, Mr. Finchley?” she asked pointedly but not without sympathy.

Finchley’s smile was a ghostly and wan attempt at recovery of aplomb, but his voice quickly took on the sharp, slicing overtones that were so much a part of him. “Miss Rogers, my dear, you sound like a cave-dwelling orphan whose idea of a gigantic lark is a square dance at the local grange. I was merely suggesting to you that we observe the simple social amenities between an employer and a secretary. I thought we’d go out...take in a show or something.”

She studied him for a long moment, not really liking the man either at this moment or any other moment, but vaguely aware of something that was eating at him and forcing this momentary lapse into at least a semblance of courtesy.

“How very sweet, Mr. Finchley,” she said. “Thank you, but no thank you.”

Finchley half snorted as he turned his back to her and once again she felt the snobbery of the man, the insufferable ego, the unbearable superiority that he threw around to hurt and humiliate.