He opened the door himself and snarled, "What do you want?"
In answer, I poked him with the end of the bat, just above the belt, to knock the wind out of him. Then, having unethically gained the upper hand, I clouted him five or six times more, and then stood over him to say, "The next time you hit my sister I won't let you off so easy." After which I took Susie home to my place for dinner.
And after which I was Frank's best friend.
People like that are so impossible to understand. Until the baseball bat episode, Frank had nothing for me but undisguised contempt. But once I'd knocked the stuffing out of him, he was my comrade for life. And I'm sure it was sincere; he would have given me the shirt off his back, had I wanted it, which I didn't.
(Also, by the way, he never hit Susie again. He still had the bad temper, but he took it out in throwing furniture out windows or punching dents in walls or going downtown to start a brawl in some bar. I offered to train him out of maltreating the house and furniture as I had trained him out of maltreating his wife, but Susie said no, that Frank had to let off steam and it would be worse if he was forced to bottle it all up inside him, so the baseball bat remained in retirement.)
Then came the children, three of them in as many years. Frank Junior came first, and then Linda Joyce, and finally Stewart. Susie had held the forlorn hope that fatherhood would settle Frank to some extent, but quite the reverse was true. Shrieking babies, smelly diapers, disrupted sleep, and distracted wives are trials and tribulations to any man, but to Frank they were—like everything else in his life—the last straw.
He became, in a word, worse. Susie restrained him I don't know how often from doing some severe damage to a squalling infant, and as the children grew toward the age of reason Frank's expressed attitude toward them was that their best move would be to find a way to become invisible. The children, of course, didn't like him very much, but then who did?
Last Christmas was when it started. Junior was six then, and Linda Joyce five, and Stewart four, so all were old enough to have heard of Santa Claus and still young enough to believe in him. Along around October, when the Christmas season was beginning, Frank began to use Santa Claus's displeasure as a weapon to keep the children "in line," his phrase for keeping them mute and immobile and terrified. Many parents, of course, try to enforce obedience the same way: "If you're bad, Santa Claus won't bring you any presents." Which, all things considered, is a negative and passive sort of punishment, wishy-washy in comparison with fire and brimstone and such. In the old days, Santa Claus would treat bad children a bit more scornfully, leaving a lump of coal in their stockings in lieu of presents, but I suppose the Depression helped to change that. There are times and situations when a lump of coal is nothing to sneer at.
In any case, an absence of presents was too weak a punishment for Frank's purposes, so last Christmastime he invented Nackles.
Who is Nackles? Nackles is to Santa Claus what Satan is to God, what Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda, what the North Wind is to the South Wind. Nackles is the new Evil.
I think Frank really enjoyed creating Nackles; he gave so much thought to the details of him. According to Frank, and as I remember it, this is Nackles: Very very tall and very very thin. Dressed all in black, with a gaunt gray face and deep black eyes. He travels through an intricate series of tunnels under the earth, in a black chariot on rails, pulled by an octet of dead-white goats.
And what does Nackles do? Nackles lives on the flesh of little boys and girls. (This is what Frank was telling his children; can you believe it?) Nackles roams back and forth under the earth, in his dark tunnels darker than subway tunnels, pulled by the eight dead-white goats, and he searches for little boys and girls to stuff into his big black sack and carry away and eat. But Santa Claus won't let him have good boys and girls. Santa Claus is stronger than Nackles, and keeps a protective shield around little children, so Nackles can't get at them.
But when little children are bad, it hurts Santa Claus, and weakens the shield Santa Claus has placed around them, and if they keep on being bad pretty soon there's no shield left at all, and on Christmas Eve instead of Santa Claus coming down out of the sky with his bag of presents Nackles comes up out of the ground with his bag of emptiness, and stuffs the bad children in, and whisks them away to his dark tunnels and the eight dead-white goats.
Frank was proud of his invention, actually proud of it. He not only used Nackles to threaten his children every time they had the temerity to come within range of his vision, he also spread the story around to others. He told me, and his neighbors, and people in bars, and people he went to see in his job as insurance salesman. I don't know how many people he told about Nackles, though I would guess it was well over a hundred. And there's more than one Frank in this world; he told me from time to time of a client or neighbor or bar-crony who had heard the story of Nackles and then said, "By God, that's great. That's what I've been needing, to keep my brats in line."
Thus Nackles was created, and thus Nackles was promulgated. And would any of the unfortunate children thus introduced to Nackles believe in this Evil Being any less than they believed in Santa Claus? Of course not.
This all happened, as I say, last Christmastime. Frank invented Nackles, used him to further intimidate his already intimidated children, and spread the story of him to everyone he met. On Christmas Day last year I'm sure there was more than one child in this town who was relieved and somewhat surprised to awaken the same as usual, in his own trundle bed, and to find the presents downstairs beneath the tree, proving that Nackles had been kept away yet another year.
Nackles lay dormant, so far as Frank was concerned, from December 25th of last year until this October. Then, with the sights and sounds of Christmas again in the land, back came Nackles, as fresh and vicious as ever. "Don't expect me to stop him!" Frank would shout. "When he comes up out of the ground the night before Christmas to carry you away in his bag, don't expect any help from me!"
It was worse this year than last. Frank wasn't doing as well financially as he'd expected, and then early in November Susie discovered she was pregnant again, and what with one thing and another Frank was headed for a real peak of ill-temper. He screamed at the children constantly, and the name" of Nackles was never far from his tongue.
Susie did what she could to counteract Frank's bad influence, but he wouldn't let her do much. All through November and December he was home more and more of the time, because the Christmas season is the wrong time to sell insurance anyway and also because he was hating the job more every day and thus giving it less of his time. The more he hated the job, the worse his temper became, and the more he drank, and the worse his limp got, and the louder were his shouts, and the more violent his references to Nackles. It just built and built and built, and reached its crescendo on Christmas Eve, when some small or imagined infraction of one of the children—Stewart, I think—resulted in Frank's pulling all the Christmas presents from all the closets and stowing them all in the car to be taken back to the stores, because this Christmas for sure it wouldn't be Santa Claus who would be visiting this house, it would be Nackles.
By the time Susie got the children to bed, everyone in the house was a nervous wreck. The children were too frightened to sleep, and Susie was too unnerved herself to be of much help in soothing them. Frank, who had taken to drinking at home lately, had locked himself in the bedroom with a bottle.
It was nearly eleven o'clock before Susie got the children all quieted down, and then she went out to the car and brought all the presents back in and arranged them under the tree. Then, not wanting to see or hear her husband any more that night—he was like a big spoiled child throwing a tantrum—she herself went to sleep on the living room sofa.
Frank Junior awoke her in the morning, crying, "Look, Mama! Nackles didn't come, he didn't come!" And pointed to the presents she'd placed under the tree.
The other two children came down shortly after, and Susie and the youngsters sat on the floor an
d opened the presents, enjoying themselves as much as possible, but still with restraint. There were none of the usual squeals of childish pleasure; no one wanted Daddy to come storming downstairs in one of his rages. So the children contented themselves with ear-to-ear smiles and whispered exclamations, and after a while Susie made breakfast, and the day carried along as pleasantly as could be expected under the circumstances.
It was a little after twelve that Susie began to worry about Frank's nonappearance. She braved herself to go up and knock on the locked door and call his name, but she got no answer, not even the expected snarl, so just around one o'clock she called me and I hurried on over. I rapped smartly on the bedroom door, got no answer, and finally I threatened to break the door in if Frank didn't open up. When I still got no answer, break the door in I did.
And Frank, of course, was gone.
The police say he ran away, deserted his family, primarily because of Susie's fourth pregnancy. They say he went out the window and dropped to the backyard, so Susie wouldn't see him and try to stop him. And they say he didn't take the car because he was afraid Susie would hear him start the engine.
That all sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Yet, I just can't believe Frank would walk out on Susie without a lot of shouting about it first. Nor that he would leave his car, which he was fonder of than his wife and children.
But what's the alternative? There's only one I can think of: Nackles.
I would rather not believe that. I would rather not believe that Frank, in inventing Nackles and spreading word of him, made him real. I would rather not believe that Nackles actually did visit my sister's house on Christmas Eve.
But did he? If so, he couldn't have carried off any of the children, for a more subdued and better-behaved trio of youngsters you won't find anywhere. But Nackles, being brand-new and never having had a meal before, would need somebody. Somebody to whom he was real, somebody not protected by the shield of Santa Claus. And, as I say, Frank was drinking that night. Alcohol makes the brain believe in the existence of all sorts of things. Also, Frank was a spoiled child if there ever was one.
There's no question but that Frank Junior and Linda Joyce and Stewart believe in Nackles. And Frank spread the gospel of Nackles to others, some of whom spread it to their own children. And some of whom will spread the new Evil to other parents. And ours is a mobile society, with families constantly being transferred by Daddy's company from one end of the country to another, so how long can it be before Nackles is a power not only in this one city, but all across the nation?
I don't know if Nackles exists, or will exist. All I know for sure is that there's suddenly a new level of meaning in the lyric of that popular Christmas song. You know the one I mean:
You'd better watch out.
Nackles
Teleplay by
Harlan Ellison
suggested by a short story by
Donald E. Westlake
Note: This teleplay should be shot in black and white. Not color stock with transfer to black and white, but true black and white like the film noir films of the Forties. By running the titles in color over the opening shot, the audience will know it is intentionally being done in this style. But more to the point— the "point" being the old saw that viewers will think there is something wrong with their sets and rush to adjust the picture—this fear no longer, in fact, has validity. Not only Rumblefish set the new idiom for b&w: there have been at least a dozen rock videos done in b&w (as well as others with touches of color added as in Rumblefish)) and "Moonlighting" has just done a mini-movie for tv in b&w. I submit that this will lend a deep-focus fix of ominous subtext to "Nackles" and will speak to the b&w plot-thread that runs throughout the script.
Thus, I am writing this teleplay for black and white.
FADE IN:
1 - INNER CITY STREET - WINTER - DAY - BLACK & WHITE -EXTREME CLOSEUP - JACK PODEY'S FOOT
A wingtip cordovan shoe; a shoe that a cop or a department store floorwalker would wear. A heavy, no-nonsense shoe. Shined. As a cantaloupe rind hits the shoe, leaving a smear and seeds on the polished leather, the shoe step stops.
CREDITS OVER IN COLOR
Camera pulls back fast to show us a filthy, slush-riddled sidewalk in upper Manhattan, somewhere in the vicinity of 101st and Fifth Avenue. Ghetto. Crowded, despite the heavy, chill, cutting wind. Everyone in overcoats and earmuffs, galoshes and mufflers that blow frantically in the wind. One of those minus-10 wind-chill factor days. Grimy snow in shoveled mounds at the curb. Car tops still wear their barrister's wigs of sooty snow.
Only one white face in a sea of jammed-together black humanity. Not a lot of natural rhythm here, just a dogged determination to scrape through till tomorrow. One white face twisted in hatred and anger. JACK PODEY, wearer of the besmirched wingtip, about forty-seven years old, and big; a big man who came out of the womb a bully. Hair cut short almost in a crew, jaw muscles that could crack walnuts, a pair of eyes midway between nasty and noisy. Jack Podey sweats a lot. And chews gum.
He grabs up the cantaloupe rind, jerks his head fast, this way and that, looking up to the tenement roofs, where he spots a little black kid, maybe twelve years old, muffler wrapped around the lower half of his face like a desperado. One Podey paw, big as a catcher's mitt, is attached to a heavy, battered leather attorney's satchel (boxlike, not portfolio). The other Podey paw is dead aimed and hurls the rind clear up to the roof.
PODEY
(snarling, yells)
Eat it, ya stinkin' jungle bunny!
The shot misses. The kid flips him off, disappears. The people passing on the sidewalk almost stop and say some bad business, but Podey is already casting around with a look that be badder than themselves. Pedestrians mumble, but move past him. Podey takes a soggy handkerchief from his topcoat pocket, wipes off his shoe. Puffs of vapor come from his mouth in the freezing air. God, he's a mean sonofabitch.
2 - CAMERA WITH PODEY - MOVING SHOT
as he jams the gray, squidgy hankie in his pocket, pulls his collar up around his throat, readjusts his muffler, and moves down the street to the entrance of a wretched building jammed between a bodega and a laundry. He pulls a slip of paper from his topcoat's dress-hankie pocket, looks at it, looks up to check the building numbers, and climbs the brownstone steps to the stoop. Note: this must be a four storey tenement building. In fact...
3 - LONG SHOT - ACROSS STREET - ESTABLISHING
We see Podey climbing the steps to the stoop. It is a FOUR STOREY BUILDING. Not three, not six, not what's convenient, dammit, but FOUR STOREYS ONLY!
4 - MEDIUM SHOT - ON PODEY
as he reaches the stoop landing. The doors which once held glass now hold plywood sheeting with graffiti defacing. He opens a door and steps inside, out of the wind and cold.
5 - INT. FIRST FLOOR LANDING
Podey goes to the mailboxes, runs one meaty finger along the line of broken-open, battered boxes. Most have no names on them. But several have Dymo tape labels. The note is still in Podey's hand. Camera closer to show the clear block printing on the note large enough to read. It says:
CONSUELO LOSADA
4TH FLOOR
RACK FOCUS off note to the mailboxes. One of them says:
LOSADA 404
and another says:
WASHINGTON 202
and Podey purposely pushes the button for Washington 202, rather than Losada 404. There is a beat as we hear the buzzing sound of the button Podey had his finger on. Then a hollow, tinny voice comes through the rusted speaker:
TENANT VOICE (O.S.)
(female, tinny)
Yes, who is it?
PODEY
(into speaker tube)
Empire State Carpeting. We came to put in the new wall-to-wall.
There is a pregnant pause of several beats.
TENANT VOICE (O.S.)
(cautious)
You say what? New carpets?
PODEY
(very tradesmanlike)
Is that
Miz Washington?
TENANT VOICE (O.S.)
Uh...yes, it is...are you sure...?
PODEY
(mock impatient)
Look lady, we got an order here from the landlord says put in new wall-to-wall, deep-pile, for Washington, apartment 202. You don't want it...we take- it back to the warehouse...
The door buzzer rings and keeps on ringing. Podey grabs for the inner door, chuckling despicably, and lets himself into the building proper. As he passes through we see a stairway.
6 - INT. TENEMENT STAIRWELL - DAY - LOW ANGLE TILTING UP PAST PODEY IN F.G.
looking up the stairwell. Like that shot in Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, enabling us to rack focus so we see the three landings above us, and the ceiling. A dirty skylight permits only ominous shadowy light to filter down. Everything is in twilight here, even at high noon. And we hear the O.S. SOUND of a group of children talking, but we cannot make out what they're discussing. It comes from overhead.
7 - MOVING SHOT - WITH PODEY - HAND-HELD
as he begins to climb. We go with him. He moves fast for a man with such bulk. It is important that he move swiftly.
As he rounds onto the second-floor landing, the door at the turn, with the numbers 202, opens and a middle-aged black woman, MRS. WASHINGTON, stands there looking expectant.