Here Comes a Candle, page 6
DOCTOR: Quite probably. Was your uncle English, Joe? That’s an old English nursery rhyme or game and it’s not too well known in this country; that’s why I ask.
JOE: Yes, Uncle Ernie was born in England. He was my father’s older brother, and my father was born in this country. They were ten years or so apart, and I guess Uncle Ernie was about five when my grandfather and grandmother moved here; my father was born after they’d been here five years.
DOCTOR: Is your uncle still living?
JOE: Not that one; I have one uncle in Chicago, but he’s my mother’s brother, and he’s the only relative I’ve got left, I guess, besides Mom. But Uncle Ernie was visiting us that week leading up to Christmas; he lived in Pittsburgh, and I think it was the first time he’d ever got to Chicago to visit us, at least the first time after I was born.
DOCTOR: And during that week he taught you that rhyme. And I agree that you were quite probably dreaming about it when your father came into the room that night and—well, you tell me about it, Joe.
JOE: Well, it was Christmas Eve. We lived in a flat on North Dearborn Street, three rooms. I guess I was probably up a little later than usual, it being Christmas Eve, but I was asleep by then, alone in the bedroom. And Mom and Pop were trimming the Christmas tree in the living room; I guess they’d finished trimming it.
DOCTOR: Your uncle was there, too?
JOE: Not just then. I mean, he’d gone around to his hotel room—he was staying at a hotel nearby because with three of us in three rooms, and just one double bed and the bed I slept in, he couldn’t stay right with us—anyway, he’d gone around to his room to get some presents. And a bottle, probably. Anyway, Mom and Pop were finishing trimming the tree, and they’d used the old-fashioned candles in holders that clip onto the tree branches. I guess they don’t use them at all anymore, anybody, and most people didn’t use them then, but a few did. And Pop liked them better than electric lights on a tree and said if everybody was careful there wasn’t any danger of fire. Anyway—(His voice has been fading, as)
MUSIC: Up and under. Silent Night, Holy Night.
ANNOUNCER: It’s a pretty tree, not a big one, but a pretty one. And those old-fashioned candles on it are really beautiful. Alvin and Florence Bailey have just lighted the candles and stepped back to admire their handiwork. Flo walks to the light switch on the wall beside the closed door that leads to the bedroom and turns off the light. The tree shows up really beautifully now. She sighs a little.
MUSIC: Up and under briefly. Same melody.
FLORENCE: Gee but it’s pretty, Al.
ALVIN: Yeah. Well, maybe we better put out the candles and not waste ’em. We’ve seen how it looks now.
FLORENCE: Your brother ought to be back any minute; let’s wait a few minutes to see if he gets here by then, huh?
ALVIN: Okay. Gawd, I can use a drink. Hope he brings that bottle and I wish I’d had sense enough to remember to bring one home myself.
FLORENCE: We’re not going to stay up very late, though, are we? You know how kids are on Christmas morning and we want to be awake too, to see Joey’s fun.
ALVIN: Sure, Flo, sure. I didn’t mean I want to hang one on. Just that I can sure use a drink or two.
FLORENCE: Wish Joe could see that tree now, with the candles going and the lights off in here otherwise. In the morning, it won’t be near as pretty as it is right now.
ALVIN: Why not, if he’s awake. We ain’t put the presents out yet. He can see the tree if he happens to be still awake.
FLORENCE: I’ll see.
SOUND: Two or three soft footsteps. A door opening very quietly.
FLORENCE: (Not much above a whisper.) Joey…. Joey….
SOUND: Quiet closing of door.
FLORENCE: (Normal voice.) He’s sound asleep. Say, Al, it’s really cold in there, in the bedroom. Felt like icicles coming out of the door at me when I opened it. I think we ought to get that window-the rest of the way shut.
ALVIN: It’s stuck. I pushed it down as far as it would go.
FLORENCE: I tried to push it farther, too, when I put Joe to bed. It’s stuck because there’s some ice on the sill. I thought it would be all right, but I didn’t know it would be that cold. We’d better get it the rest of the way shut.
ALVIN: All right, I’ll try to chip off the ice. But it’ll probably wake the kid. Turning the light on, if nothing else.
FLORENCE: You can do it without the light on. Take one of those candles. And just noise doesn’t wake Joey, if it isn’t too loud. You can be careful, and the ice isn’t frozen very tight. Maybe you can just pry it off with a knife.
ALVIN: Knife won’t do it. I’ll get the hatchet; I can chip it off quiet, I guess.
SOUND: Footsteps. Drawer being opened and closed. Footsteps again.
ALVIN: Good thing you thought of a candle. But remember tomorrow to get batteries for that damn flashlight, will you?
FLORENCE: Sure, Al. Be as quiet as you can now.
ALVIN: (We hear him walking again as he speaks.) Sure. I’ll take a white candle; we got too many of them anyway and I’ll probably use some of it up. Maybe you better put the others out, Ernie might be half an hour yet.
FLORENCE: I’ll wait till you’re through in there. Try not to wake Joey, but if he wakes up anyway, we might as well let him see the tree.
ALVIN: Sure.
SOUND: Click of latch as door opens, then closes again quietly.
MUSIC: Soft but menacing. Deep chords in bass.
ANNOUNCER: (Mysterious.) It’s dark in the bedroom, dark despite the single candle which Al Bailey carries carefully as he tiptoes past Joe’s bed and then past the big double bed to the window. He carries the hatchet in his other hand. When he reaches the window he pushes the curtain aside with the hand that holds the hatchet and then puts the hatchet down on the sill while he looks around for a place to put down the candle so he’ll have both hands free to work. He reaches to put the candle on the sill, too, and then realizes that the candle, in the clip, won’t stand upright. He looks around and sees that the projecting edge of the top of a chest of drawers standing about two feet from the window is the answer. He opens the clip wide enough to put it over the edge, and the candle is firmly clipped there; he has both hands free. Holding the curtain back with one hand, he begins, as quietly as he can, to chip at the ice on the lower edge of the window sash. He pulls the window open a little higher to get at the ice better. The candle flame sways, but does not go out. Now he can get at the ice, and he chips away at it gently…. Now let’s go back over to the child’s bed in which little Joe Bailey, age three and a half, is sleeping. We can see him dimly in the light of the candle and we can see on the wall behind him the monstrous flickering shadow that the candlelight casts there. And what’s this we hear? A voice? Yes, but it’s a voice that’s inside Joe’s head, a voice in a dream; no one but Joe—and you and me—can hear it. It’s the voice of his Uncle Ernie reciting a delicious little jingle that puts pleasant little shivers up and down Joe’s back. Listen carefully and you can hear the voice in Joe’s dream—listen carefully—
VOICE: (It is the voice of Joe’s Uncle Ernie, but distorted in echo chamber. It is speaking with what would be mock menace normally, but sounds truly mysterious and menacing through the echo chamber.) Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here come a chopper to chop off your head.
ANNOUNCER: (Softer, more mysterious) And back at the window—
SOUND: Window going shut, suddenly.
ANNOUNCER: Joe Bailey’s eyes jerk open. He sits up in bed, frightened, not by the sound that woke him but by the memory of what he was just dreaming. There is a strange dim light in the room but he hasn’t turned toward it yet. He rubs his eyes with little fists trying to drive away the dream. But from the dream, he is still thinking to himself—
VOICE: (It is Joe’s own voice this time, a child’s voice, but again through the echo chamber to indicate that it is thought rather than actual speaking.) Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your—(Voice fades out)—
ANNOUNCER: And at the window, Alvin Bailey is turning to come away. But he has become entangled in the curtain. Finding it continually in his way as he tried to work, he had thrown it over him, standing, as it were, between the curtain and the window. Now he’s tangled in it, just for a moment…. Just for the exact moment that Joe takes his little fists away from his eyes and finds that the mysterious light is still there in the room, and he’s now nearly enough awake to turn to see where it comes from. It comes from a candle that no hand holds. And beside the candle but not holding it is a robed headless figure whose raised hand holds a shining—
JOE: Screams. Screams. SCREAMS.
ALVIN: Joe! Joe, what’s wrong?
SOUND: Door being thrown open. Joe is continuing to scream at the top of his voice.
FLORENCE: Joey! What is it, Joey? Are you having a nightmare? Wake up, Joey. Nothing’s wrong, Joey! Al. what—
MUSIC: Up and under on theme. Through a few bars of it we hear Joe’s screams, then they fade.
DOCTOR: Yes, Joe, that’s the way your mother told it to me. Was she able to get you fully awake right away?
JOE: Well, Doctor, I guess the worst of it was that I was awake. She—and Pop—didn’t figure out right away what had happened or what had scared me. And they thought I was having a nightmare and tried to get me out of it. But I was awake already; it was a nightmare all right, but not the way they thought at first. Finally when I got calmed down a little, I guess they put together what I told them and what Pop had been doing and where the candle had been and about the hatchet and everything and figured out what had happened and what had scared me.
DOCTOR: Were you able to go to sleep again that night? Or do you remember that part of it?
JOE: I’m not sure. I guess maybe I did after a while, but it would have been a pretty long while, probably.
DOCTOR: Did you have a nightmare—a real one—when you did?
JOE: Mom says I didn’t, that first night. I had plenty of them from then on, though. And there was another thing; after that I stuttered pretty bad for a few years. Until I was six. The stuttering went away when I was six years old. Oh, one other thing I remember. I guess the first time it came out I had a phobia was the next morning, Christmas morning. You want to hear about that?
DOCTOR: Please.
JOE: It was when I went out and saw the Christmas tree and there were candles on it. I screamed and ran through the kitchen and downstairs and outside. Mom caught me about half a block away and brought me back; I mean, talked me into coming back. And when she found out what scared me, she came in the flat first and took all the candles off the tree and hid them somewhere. And then I wasn’t afraid of the tree any more. It was all right then.
DOCTOR: And you’ve been afraid of candles—and hatchets—ever since?
JOE: Yes, only like I told you it’s going away. I can even look at one now. Either one, I mean. And while I still have a nightmare once in a while, it isn’t as bad as it used to be. I guess I’m getting over it all right. Only Mom worries about it that by the time I’m as old I am now I’m not completely over it.
DOCTOR: Did she get medical advice while you were still a child, concerning the nightmares?
JOE: I think she took me to doctors a few times, but what they told her I don’t know or don’t remember. I guess most of them said it would probably wear off or something. And we’ve—well, we’ve been pretty poor, I guess, most of the time, so when it didn’t seem to do much good, I guess she quit taking me.
DOCTOR: Has there been any recurrence lately that caused her to bring you to me now, Joe? Anything at all?
JOE: No, it’s been wearing off. I guess what gave her the idea this time was that she just learned about you from someone. She hadn’t known that there was anything like a consulting psychologist that didn’t charge money up in the hundreds of dollars for a long course of treatment, like a psychiatrist would, or she’d have taken me to see you—or somebody—a long time ago.
DOCTOR: I see. Tell me, Joe, does your feeling of fear towards candles specialize on any particular kind or size, or is it just any candle?
JOE: Any one, I guess. I mean, it doesn’t matter if it’s big or little or what color it is. But if it’s lighted, it’s worse. Even a candle that isn’t lighted gives me the willies, but not so bad. And it’s not any particular kind of a—a chopper, either. An ax or a hatchet, either one, is about the same. Unless maybe an ax, one with a long handle, is worse. I don’t know why that would be, because it was a hatchet Pop was carrying that night—only of course I didn’t know it was Pop—but anyway one kind of a chopper is as bad as another. Even a cleaver, like a butcher’s cleaver.
DOCTOR: Do you happen to recall the first time—after that night—when you saw an ax or a hatchet?
JOE: No, I don’t. I remember being scared as the devil every time I saw one while I was a kid, but I don’t remember the first time. It wasn’t that same night, anyway. Pop must have dropped the hatchet or put it down somewhere getting to me after I yelled, and I think he knocked the candle, clip and all, off the edge of the bureau and put it out. Anyway, I don’t remember seeing either of them again that same night; probably Pop carried them out while Mom was still working on me, trying to get me calmed down and back to sleep.
DOCTOR: It must have been a terrible experience. Tell me this, Joe, did you ever have a tendency—then or now—to blame anyone for it? Your father?
JOE: How was it his fault? It was just an accident.
DOCTOR: Of course it was. But that isn’t a full answer to what I asked. Sometimes we blame people for things even when strict reason tells us they are not to blame. And a child of three or four isn’t very adept at strict reasoning. Joe, did you love your father very much?
JOE: (Hesitantly.) I—don’t know. He died when I was six, and it’s hard to remember much about him that far back.
DOCTOR: Tell me something about him. Joe. What did he do, for example?
JOE: (Hesitates again.) Well—he was a bartender.
DOCTOR: Not at that time, was be, Joe? Prohibition would have been in effect in—Let’s see, you’re fifteen now? I believe your mother said that was your age.
JOE: Yes, I was fifteen two months ago.
DOCTOR: You look older. I’d have guessed you as seventeen. But let’s see—this is forty-four and that was the Christmas you were three. That would have been nineteen thirty-two. Yes, there was still Prohibition then, and for a year or two after.
JOE: (There is a touch of defiance in his voice.) He was a bartender. In a speakeasy. After Prohibition did go out, he was out of work because he’d been arrested a few times and he couldn’t get a license as a regular bartender.
DOCTOR: And what did he do after Prohibition ended?
JOE: Nothing much, I guess. That would have been in the Depression and he couldn’t get a job, except part time once in a while. Mom got a job as a waitress, and I guess we lived mostly on what she made.
DOCTOR: Do you hold against him, Joe, the way he made a living—before Repeal, I mean?
JOE: No.
DOCTOR: But you didn’t love him very much, did you?
JOE: Sure, I did. What’s that got to do with it? Sure, I loved him.
DOCTOR: AS much after that Christmas Eve as you did before?
JOE: Sure.
DOCTOR: He lived only until you were six? Two and a half years after that Christmas Eve?
JOE: Yes.
DOCTOR: HOW did he die, Joe?
(Pause.)
DOCTOR: If it’s unpleasant for you to remember, Joe, I’m sorry. But if I’m to help you—
JOE: He was shot. He was shot while he was on a holdup job, a box office at a movie theater. I guess he couldn’t take being broke any more. (Even more defiantly; Joe’s voice sounds as though he is on the verge of tears.) And I don’t blame him for that, either. I’d do the same thing myself, under the same circumstances!
DOCTOR: (Very mildly.) I see. I hope you don’t really mean that, Joe. The part about doing the same thing yourself. And I don’t think you do mean it, really. You said it, probably, just to prove that you really did love your father and that you don’t blame him for his—mistake. And it’s well that you don’t try to judge him.
JOE: He was a swell guy.
DOCTOR: I’m sure he was. Tell me, Joe, how did you react to the news of his death? Do you remember how you felt when you heard that your father was dead?
(Pause.)
DOCTOR: I’m sorry I have to ask you that, Joe. But can’t you see that the very fact that you hesitate to answer shows that the answer might be important.
JOE: (Sullenly.) I didn’t hear it. I was there.
MUSIC: Eerie sting.
JOE: I was there. I saw him get killed.
DOCTOR: (Startled.) You mean he took you along, on a holdup?
JOE: NO. All right, if you’ve got to know! I took the cops there! It was my fault he got killed!
MUSIC: Up and under on theme, the motif from Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead.
ANNOUNCER: Does Joe Bailey mean that he deliberately got his father killed? Or, although he obviously blames himself, was it accidental? What really happened that night when Joe was six? Does he really remember it now as it actually happened or is it something in his imagination, something of a piece with the other hideous nightmares that stalked his childhood after that Christmas Eve in nineteen thirty-two when he saw, as he awakened from a dream, the candle and the chopper? The two things that thereafter became symbols to him, forever associated with nameless horror in his subconscious mind. Docs Joe think that he really loved his father after that Christmas Eve—or does he protest too much? Was his father thereafter a symbol to him, also—a symbol of terror? We know now that not one, but two, very unfortunate things happened to Joe during his early childhood. Will he remain sane? Or will the chopper get him? Tune in again tomorrow for another thrilling episode in—
MUSIC: Eerie sting.
