A few days ago, Winchester sent out an S.O.S. to anyone out there. Perhaps his plea would fall on deaf ears, lost in the silence of space, somewhere in the universe. But he had to try…
As his spirit left his body, a bright light welcomed him to the afterlife, a light so warm and so full of love, like a feeling he had never experienced during his earthly existence. He would’ve been content to remain with this light for eternity. He was no longer afraid of death or what may occur after death. His time to face death had arrived.
Yet, in an agonizing instant, when he prepared to meet his maker, he was taken from the light and deposited here.
“Here” wasn’t Hell or a distant planet; nor was it a secluded country or a deserted island in the middle of nowhere.
No, “here” was his own bed.
********
When Winchester awoke, he felt fine. The brain tumor, which had prompted emergency surgery, no longer ravished his weak body. In fact, Winchester felt better than he had in a long time.
He gazed out the bedroom window. The morning was bright and sunny, a typical spring day. The screens were in the windows and a gentle, crisp breeze blew into the room.
Everything was as it should be as he scanned the bedroom. There was the closet he shared with his wife. A clock on the wall. A paper calendar hanging near the bedroom door. A shelf of his beloved books. A bureau with drawers and a mirror. A wide-screen TV on the wall across from the bed. A clothes hamper. The basics -- after shave, deodorant, Mildred’s perfume -- on a small shelf.
Where was Mildred? Mildred was not one for practical jokes but she had to be in on this one.
He clamored out of bed and slowly dressed in old clothes from the nearby closet.
“Mildred?” he called. “Mildred, are you here?”
The house sounded empty, his words echoing off the walls.
“Jake! Here, boy!” he called, whistling for his dog. Funny, Jake always ran when Winchester whistled for him. When Jake didn’t bound up the stairs, Winchester began to worry.
The kitchen was also empty. He called for Mildred again, thinking she might be in the basement doing laundry or in the back yard. He briskly shuffled to the deck and perused the neighborhood.
The silence was unusual for such a lovely day. Where were the birds? Even his annoying neighbor, Mr. Findley, with his equally annoying lawn mower, was quiet this morning.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and returned to the deck, sitting and waiting. The church bells did not ring at ten. It was as if the world had frozen. Time was moving: the seconds, minutes and hours continued to pass on his watch. But what happened to life?
He tried calling Mildred. It rang and rang but she didn’t pick up. It wasn’t unusual for her to get up early and begin the day before him. Theirs was a life of retirement. They did what they wanted when they pleased, compared to the structured timetable when they both worked from nine to five.
Oh, theirs was a good life overall. Their grandchildren visited. They played a regular weekly game of Bridge with friends. They ate out at a local diner every noon, where many of their senior citizen friends gathered. Rarely were they separated.
Then Winchester changed. Everything seemed to annoy him. The laughter of his own grandchildren. Any sort of noise, even pleasant sounds. People, in general, bothered him more than usual. Retirement became a drag. His sadness increased, despite the warmth and joy of his close friends and loving family. He started thinking more and more about death. Regrets bubbled to the surface. Apathy grew. He didn’t care about anything or anyone anymore.
He wanted to be left alone most of the time. And he began to isolate himself, much to Mildred’s chagrin. She begged her husband to see a doctor, to talk to someone about his feelings. But Winchester was a very proud man. He was always taught to hide his feelings. It was a sign of weakness, or so he thought, to admit to a problem he couldn’t handle on his own.
He grew lonely, deep, deep inside, in his heart.
But now, on this particular morning, he feared for Mildred. For the first time in a long time, he stopped only thinking of himself.
He missed Mildred.
********
Knowing Mildred, who was a kind-hearted soul, she may have been visiting a sick friend at the hospital, or attended church, or perhaps she was running an errand for Father McCarthy, as she often did.
Perhaps there was something about this strange phenomenon of silence on the news, so he sat in his lounge chair and turned on the television. He found snowy static on every channel. The cable must be out, he surmised.
Winchester got up from his lounge chair, clicked on the portable kitchen radio and frantically browsed the dial, listening for music, the news, anything.
Everywhere, on both AM and FM, was the same annoying static.
Enough is enough, he decided. The car was not in the driveway (Mildred must have had it) so he decided to walk downtown.
It only took a few blocks to realize that, for such a beautiful day, not a soul was outside.
The little town was empty.
He stood at the corner of Main Street and Bridge Street, the busiest intersection in town, searching for people.
Where are all the people?
The town was still there. All the buildings remained. There was Seacrist’s Newsstand, and Woolworth’s, Whitey’s Hardware Store and Charlie’s Music Shop, Sal’s Pizzeria and Dell’s Restaurant. Nothing was different.
There were no cars in the lots or parked along the curbs or side streets. He began to wonder what had happened to the world. Was he dreaming? Or was he hallucinating, a by-product of the brain surgery? Had there been an evacuation, an incident at the nearby nuclear power plant? Was there a meltdown while he was sleeping?
Was everyone dead?
Winchester began to panic. He called out into the silence:
“Hello? Is anybody alive?”
His desperate words resonated throughout the barren town. Normally, noisy traffic would consume the area -- car horns honking, tires screeching, music playing from car radios, customers chit-chatting over breakfast at the outdoor cafés.
Instead, there was only eerie silence.
The traffic lights worked. Even the “Walk/Don’t Walk” automatic signal functioned. It was good to hear the automatic voice inform pedestrians when to cross the street. At least it was a voice.
It was as though someone had reached down and scooped up all the people, like in that Twilight Zone episode where an alien captures a young couple out on a date and places them in a miniature town on another planet for his giant-sized little daughter to play with.
There was no sign of any weather or environmental calamity. The structure of Phoenixville remained intact, just as he had last seen it. No hurricane, tornado, fire or flood.
It wasn’t a holiday. Even if it was, there would be somebody hanging around town -- a kid riding a bike, a senior citizen sitting and watching traffic go by, or someone taking their dog for a walk.
Then he noticed someone!
It was a gentleman, dark-haired, wearing a gray business suit and tie. He stood on the corner, casually smoking a cigarette.
“Hey, you!” yelled Winchester.
The gentleman looked his way, nodded- then dissolved into thin air!
By the time Winchester scurried down the block the wispy smoke of the gentleman’s cigarette had dissipated into the spring morning.
“What the…” the old man said, rubbing his eyes. “Am I hallucinating? Is this entire charade a hallucination?”
********
Winchester wandered for the next hour, unsure where he was going, and really, not caring at this point. He kept thinking about the well-dressed, fairly handsome gentleman with the cigarette. He looked familiar -- where had he seen him before? Was that the orderly who wheeled him from his hospital room onto the elevator, through the winding halls of the hospital, their final destination the operating room?
Yes, that was it. He was the last person Winchester saw before he went under.
Those eyes…those penetrating eyes. He could never forget those dark eyes, made even darker by those dark eyebrows.
Maybe he would see him again. This time he would demand an answer. What happened to townsfolk? What happened to Mildred? And why was this gentleman allowed to remain while the others disappeared?
He soon came upon the local grocery market. Wouldn’t it be funny if he ran into Mildred, loading the week’s grocery bags into the backseat of the car? She could give him a ride home and explain where everyone went.
But to his dismay, there were no cars in the parking lot.
Walking into the market was like entering a tomb. The lights were on, but the aisles were empty. The fresh fruit was stocked, and there were the perishables, cans of pet food and bags of junk food. Fresh milk, bread, and eggs were plentiful. At the very least there was food for the foreseeable future. This isolation reminded him of another classic episode of The Twilight Zone, where no one was left after a nuclear war.
“Time Enough to Last” for sure.
Winchester wasn’t used to taking food and just walking out of the store, so when he grabbed a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, he left a few dollars at one of the empty check-out counters.
More and more, he concluded there had to be a nuclear accident. Frightening thoughts of Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island raced through his head. Were there traces of radioactivity all around him? Even though it looked like he had escaped the worst of any radioactive activity, how long did the old man have until radiation poisoning eventually caught up to him? He worried he might die a slow, agonizing, disfiguring death.
He half expected Mildred to be home, greeting him at the door with Jake. But his heart sank when he opened the screen door and no one was there. ‘Why even lock the door anymore?” he mumbled aloud.
Yes. He regularly talked to himself now. At least there was his own voice answering.
“’Silence is golden’ my butt,” he muttered.
As he ate a peanut butter sandwich, he did a little research on the computer, looking for articles on radioactivity, reminding himself to purchase (or “pick-up”) a Geiger counter at the hardware store tomorrow. How high or low the radiation dose he may have been exposed to would ultimately determine his fate.
Winchester sat on the deck that evening as twilight engulfed his little corner of the world. The atmosphere remained perfectly still. He missed the sound of crickets and the once-annoying cicada bugs.
He kept thinking…WHY? The question haunted him day and night. It’s all he thought about now.
He went over the possibilities in his mind, over and over again, while sitting on his deck. Was it a virus that wiped out humanity? An asteroid that hit Earth somewhere, similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? Why no birds, no insects, no pets, no wildlife? The frightening thought of extraterrestrial life conquering Earth crossed his mind, but then, where were the aliens? Had something gone terribly wrong in the grand scheme of things and he, of all people, was all that remained in this lonely universe?
He, and that strange gentleman he saw downtown, that is.
Or, was this a life-lesson from God? “Ok, if you want to be alone so bad, I’ll show you what it’s really like to be alone! When I get done with you, Winchester Van Dyke, you’ll be begging for company. You’ll never want to be alone again.”
********
Even though he was exhausted and had gone to bed extra early (What else was there to do?), he had trouble sleeping all night. His hope was to wake up and find that this bizarre day was just a nightmare all along, and he would wake up the next day and everything would be as it used to be, with the aroma of sizzling bacon and freshly-brewed coffee filling the air, encouraging him to drag his lazy, old bones out of bed.
Mildred’s side of the bed remained cold and untouched. Mildred and Winchester always made sure to hug at the beginning of each day. This morning he felt like staying in bed and pulling the covers over his head. He forced himself to get out of bed and get dressed with the hope that everything might come back.
He must keep hope alive, for without hope, there was nothing left.
The day was a carbon-copy of the day before: bright, warm sunshine, a clear blue sky overhead, the sound of a slight breeze rustling the green leaves.
There was no activity downtown. It’s funny, he half expected no one to be around. He was slowly getting used to solitude, not that he liked being alone or wanted to be alone anymore.
Winchester found the Geiger counter at Whitey’s Hardware, leaving payment at the cash register to ease his guilt, and then he began his most immediate task.
The old man retraced everywhere he had been the day before. Everything turned out negative for radioactivity. This conclusion was met with a double-edged sword: in one way he was relieved to know his physical health wasn’t in jeopardy, but he remained baffled by his lonely existence.
Is everyday going to be like this from now on? That dreadful thought -- a lifetime of nothing -- was the cruelest and most frightening thought of all.
He walked to the little diner where he and his wife ate lunch daily with their friends. The diner was still there. It surprised him to find the door open. He found emptiness inside -- the same booths and small tables where he enjoyed lunch every day. The menus were laid-out on the tables, along with the paper napkins wrapped around silverware. Fresh flowers adorned the center of each table. Everything looked normal.
But where were the customers? The waitresses bustling here and there, refilling coffee cups and taking orders? The aroma of food was missing. The chatter of people. The clanging of glasses. The tinkling of forks, spoons and knives against dishes.
There…in the corner of the diner… sat that well-dressed gentleman. There he was again! Sitting there casually, gently inhaling on his cigarette, flicking the ashes into an ashtray on the table, just looking and nodding as he did before, not saying a word, only staring.
Gingerly, Winchester shuffled his way. He didn’t want to rush over, for fear of scaring the man and causing him to vanish again.
“I just want to talk to you, buddy!” Winchester said, trying to remain calm. “Don’t go away, pal… Stay right there and talk to me. Let’s talk. I only have a few questions to ask you…Please…”
But as before, when Winchester approached, the gentleman disappeared again, the smoky aroma remaining for a brief second before it too vanished.
Winchester sat down at that table and did something he hadn’t done in a long time…he cried.
********
A feeling of intense claustrophobia was suddenly overwhelming as he slowly walked home. An immense feeling of despair, of loneliness. Hope was fading.
Such a beautiful day! Before, on spring days similar to this, he might be gardening or watching the ballgame on television after lunch. What a waste of this beautiful weather…for only him.
I wonder what life is like outside of Phoenixville? he thought. This was his hometown – his entire life was spent in this little town, where he was born and raised. With no car available, no buses or trains running, even if he thought of leaving town, of searching for others, he couldn’t.
Then it hit him. He hurried his pace home.
Once there, he fired up his computer and hit the Earth Cam app. Cameras were stationed around the world, making it possible to view cities and famous attractions for entertainment purposes. Sometimes, just for the heck of it, he and Mildred would gaze at worldwide destinations, dreaming of past or future vacations.
Knowing other people were out there would bring him comfort. Were they going through the same thing he was? Were they reaching out for help too?
But as Winchester searched locations, places usually crowded, no matter what time or day, places like Times Square, Las Vegas, or the beaches in Brazil, all he found was emptiness!
He switched locations again and again, hoping to catch someone -- anyone -- on camera, ultimately reaching the same conclusion…
He was all alone in the world.
Suddenly, like a madman, he rushed out of the house and stood in the middle of his empty street. He raised both out-stretched arms in the air and yelled at the top of his lungs:
“PLEASE! BRING EVERYONE BACK! DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE IN THIS WORLD! TAKE ME, TOO! I CAN’T TAKE BEING ALONE ANYMORE!”
He half-expected a giant hand or claw to reach down and scoop him up. But nothing happened.
Nothing.
********
That was a few days ago. Nothing had changed. The loneliness became insufferable, so much so that the thought of doing away with himself crossed his mind. He didn’t want to live this way. This was not living -- constantly being alone -- with no hope of ever seeing, touching, hearing, laughing, talking or listening to another human being ever again.
That’s when Winchester made the video. He would send it to all the email addresses he could remember. He hoped to reach into infinity, hoping that somehow, someone might see the video. It was his last gasp, the last straw before....
His gun, still in the bedroom dresser drawer, was accessible. IF he didn’t receive an answer, a response to his desperate plea or a word from God, let’s say by tomorrow, he would take his life into his own hands. His final act would be his decision and his choice.
Do heaven and a hell exist, or are we like dried flowers and simply wither away when we die? well…at least he wouldn’t be alone anymore.
Wait…was that it? Was he dead already? Did he survive the surgery or not? Is this HELL?
In that futile moment, when he was at the darkest hour of his life, he suddenly found a spark of hope.
If this is all in my mind,” he mumbled,” even if brain surgery did something to my brain, I am still in charge! I refuse to surrender. This may only be a figment of my own imagination. That’s it! This is all in my mind. I can control my own thoughts. I still have control over my life.
Don’t worry, he told himself. All the people will be back. All the animals will return. We all need human contact. Now I know. All that time, wishing I was alone, isolating myself, afraid of death, afraid of aging, those times I now regret… What I wouldn’t give to shake someone’s hand, to hear Jake bark -- yes, even to hear my neighbor’s lawn mower -- especially to feel the warm hug of Mildred.
That was Winchester’s message as he ended the video and hit the “Send” button.
Savor Life.
Off went the testament, like a spacecraft exploring interstellar space, searching for life. Now, go to bed, go back to sleep, and in the morning, you will wake up and everything WILL be back to normal.
********
Winchester couldn’t wait to come home from the hospital. He couldn’t wait to get home again, to take a shower, to sleep in his own bed again, to see his dog. Most of all, it was great to see Mildred by his bedside when he awoke.
The surgery to remove his brain tumor had been a success. Thank God, the tumor turned out to be benign. His “nightmare” was merely a symptom of the induced coma and medication. He had a second chance at life, a modern-day Ebeneezer Scrooge.
The first time back on his beloved deck, with Jake by his hammock, Winchester soaked in the sound of the singing birds. He called his grandchildren and asked when the next Little League game was scheduled. He couldn’t wait to join Mildred and their friends at the diner again. Bridge Night was scheduled for next Thursday.
All was right with the world and the world welcomed him back. And there was so much to be thankful for.
********
When he finally had time to play catch-up with the simple but routine events of life, such as checking email, Winchester found a few get well wishes from friends and distant relatives, the same spam as always, namely ads and discount sales information, and one piece of mail that had been stamped “return to sender.”
He disobeyed previous warnings of opening strange files from unknown senders -- because this particular email came from himself.
He clicked on the attached video and watched in horror.
The memories returned. The loneliness, the emptiness, the silence. He remembered making the video. He watched himself issuing an irrational plea for help.
Savor Life.
********
Whatever happened when Winchester was unconscious was real. It wasn’t a nightmare; it wasn’t because of the drugs or the tumor or even his own brain being defiant. As he replayed the video -- again and again -- he noticed the wall calendar behind him on the screen, just as it was now. He snapped his head to check it: 2026. Then he gazed at the computer screen, zooming closer to focus on the same wall calendar in the video.
The calendar read May 2036!
Ten years into the future!
Somehow, he had taken a detour through the universe on his way back to life. Somehow, he had been a visitor in the year 2036. Not the past, not the present, but the future.
Somehow, he was given another chance. He was allowed to return to life in the year 2026, perhaps to warn others as he had been warned. Perhaps it wasn’t only a personal message. Perhaps it was a message for all mankind.
Would anyone believe him?
That single, terrifying thought consumed him from that day forward, the realization that Something or someone would eliminate all life on Earth by 2036.
But would anyone believe him?
And from that moment on, everywhere he went, he saw that well-dressed man with the dark eyes, lurking in the shadows, sitting openly at the diner or the ballgame, never saying a word, only watching and staring, thinking, calculating, as if he were writing a story in his mind.
Then it hit him -- he finally recognized the man.
Please, Mr. Serling…end this episode. Move on to the next story. Extinguish your cigarette and end this nightmare.
All this time, Winchester was living his own, personal episode of The Twilight Zone.
Only he knew.
Alone.