|
Forerunners of “Twenty Two” (related links: Rokahr Change)
In 1944 Bennett Cerf edited Famous Ghost Stories, a book of short stories written by several authors. He also contributed a variation of a story first told by a Victorian era British diplomat about a vision that saved him from death in an elevator crash in a chapter called “The Current Crop of Ghost Stories.” Cerf uses the language and writing style of that era to give it a feel of authenticity – of a story being told in the first person by someone in a different time. It works.
First things first...
From http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/
“Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquiess of Dufferin and Ava, (21 June 1826 -12 February 1902) was a British public servant and prominent member of Victorian society. I his youth, he was a popular figure in the Court of Queen Victoria...
"Dufferin and the Ghost"
“Legend has it that Dufferin once saw a
ghost,
which saved his life. Late one night, while staying in a manor house in Ireland, he looked down and saw a man walking across the
lawn carrying a coffin on his back. The man stopped and looked up at Dufferin and they stared at each other for a moment. Then the man continued on into the
shadows and disappeared. Dufferin later stated he thought the whole event was just a bad dream.
C. B. Colby gives a more detailed account of Dufferin’s elevator story in Strangely Enough published in 1959.. What makes it significant in the evolution of the story are his notes on the similarities he found in another story called “The King in Yellow” “The King in Yellow” was written in 1895. It is a true ghost story where a long dead coachman replaces the man carrying the casket. In this one, a male painter and his female model lover share different aspects of the vision and the story ends in their double homicide.
The next iteration of Dufferin’s story shows up in an E. F. Benson story published in 1906 called “The Bus Conductor.” Here are some excerpt from the perspective of the man who had the vision talking to his friend:
“We had dined alone here in Graeme Street,” he said, “and after dinner I went out to some party, and you stopped at home. At dinner your man did not wait, and when I asked where he was, you told me he was ill, and, I thought, changed the subject rather abruptly. You gave me your latch-key when I went out, and on coming back, I found you had gone to bed. There were, however, several letters for me, which required answers. I wrote them there and then, and posted them at the pillar-box opposite. So I suppose it was rather late when I went upstairs. “You had put me in the front room, on the third floor, overlooking the street, a room which I thought you generally occupied yourself. It was a very hot night, and though there had been a moon when 1 started to my party, on my return the whole sky was cloud-covered, and it both looked and felt as if we might have a thunderstorm before morning. I was feeling very sleepy and heavy, and it was not till after I had got into bed that I noticed by the shadows of the windowframes on the blind that only one of the windows was open. But it did not seem worth while to get out of bed in order to open it, though I felt rather airless and uncomfortable, and I went to sleep.SDGertj3456 425435 43$#%wer 435as 412435a 452345$!$%wer;lhk3465h n213 wrn4 q45h SADR4356 546&&* n5625$%$@ 42$@$% $%4 5%^ “What time it was when I awoke I do not know, but it was certainly not yet dawn...
“Then I heard suddenly and not very far away the sound of some approaching vehicle; I could distinguish the tread of two horses walking at a slow foot’s pace. They were, though not yet visible, coming up the street, and yet this indication of life did not abate that dreadful sense of loneliness which I have spoken of. Also in some dim unformulated way that which was coming seemed to me to have something to do with the cause of my oppression. “Then the vehicle came into sight. At first I could not distinguish what it was. Then I saw that the horses were black and had long tails, and that what they dragged was made of glass, but had a black frame. It was a hearse. Empty. “It was moving up this side of the street. It stopped at your door. “Then the obvious solution struck me. You had said at dinner that your man was ill, and you were, I thought, unwilling to speak more about his illness. No doubt, so I imagined now, he was dead, and for some reason, perhaps because you did not want me to know anything about it, you were having the body removed at night. This, I must tell you, passed through my mind quite instantaneously, and it did not occur to me how unlikely it really was, before the next thing happened. “I was still leaning out of the window, and I remember also wondering, yet only momentarily, how odd it was that I saw things — or rather the one thing I was looking at — so very distinctly. Of course, there was a moon behind the clouds, but it was curious how every detail of the hearse and the horses was visible. There was only one man, the driver, with it, and the street was otherwise absolutely empty. It was at him I was looking now. I could see every detail of his clothes, but from where I was, so high above him, I could not see his face. He had on grey trousers, brown boots, a black coat buttoned all the way up, and a straw hat. Over his shoulder there was a strap, which seemed to support some sort of little bag. He looked exactly like — well, from my description what did he look exactly like?” “Why — a bus-conductor,” I said instantly. “So I thought, and even while I was thinking this, he looked up at me. He had a rather long thin face, and on his left cheek there was a mole with a growth of dark hair on it. All this was as distinct as if it had been noonday, and as if I was within a yard of him. But —so instantaneous was all that takes so long in the telling — I had not time to think it strange that the driver of a hearse should be so unfunereally dressed. “Then he touched his hat to me, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “‘Just room for one inside, sir,’ he said.”
oved you so that's why I stole this." And she shot him. “There was something so odious, so coarse, so unfeeling about this that I instantly drew my head in, pulled the blind down again, and then, for what reason I do not know, turned on the electric light in order to see what time it was. The hands of my watch pointed to half-past eleven. “It was then for the first time, I think, that a doubt crossed my mind as to the nature of what I had just seen. But I put out the light again, got into bed, and began to think. We had dined; I had gone to a party, I had come back and written letters, had gone to bed and had slept. So how could it be half-past eleven? . . . Or — what half-past eleven was it? “Then another easy solution struck me; my watch must have stopped. But it had not; I could hear it ticking. “There was stillness and silence again. I expected every moment to hear muffled footsteps on the stairs, footsteps moving slowly and smally under the weight of a heavy burden, but from inside the house there was no sound whatever. Outside, too, there was the same dead silence, while the hearse waited at the door. And the minutes ticked on and ticked on, and at length I began to see a difference in the light in the room, and knew that the dawn was beginning to break outside. But how had it happened, then, that if the corpse was to be removed at night it had not gone, and that the hearse still waited, when morning was already coming? “Presently I got out of bed again, and with the sense of strong physical shrinking I went to the window and pulled back the blind. The dawn was coming fast; the whole street was lit by that silver hueless light of morning. But there was no hearse there. “Once again I looked at my watch. It was just a quarter-past four. But I would swear that not half an hour had passed since it had told me that it was half-past eleven. “Then a curious double sense, as if I was living in the present and at the same moment had been living in some other time, came over me. It was dawn on June 25th, and the street, as natural, was empty. But a little while ago the driver of a hearse had spoken to me, and it was half-past eleven. What was that driver, to what plane did he belong? And again what half-past eleven was it that I had seen recorded on the dial of my watch?
If you saw Dead of Night 1945 you’ll know without being told that “The Hearse Driver” segment is a slightly altered version of Benson’s “Bus Conductor.” The producers even give him credit for it although he died four of five years before the screenplay was written. It borrows nothing from Bennett Cerf’s 1944 “Room For One More” but dips a bit into Dufferin’s elevator story, changes the setting to a medical clinic, adds a nurse and doctor and resets the clock in Benson’s story to 9:45 when the vision begins. “The Hearse Driver” keeps the 4:15 time in Benson's story but puts it in a different order with the nurse noting that it’s 9:45 just before she leaves the room and the vision starting at 4:15. When it ends the clock shows 9:50, indicating that only 5 minutes have passed.
The man reports the disturbing event to his doctor who dismisses the significance of the abrupt time shift and the hearse driver’s words as a natural phenomenon considering his condition. But upon discharge from the clinic, the man walks to a bus stop, learns that it’s 4:15 then sees that the bus conductor is the hearse driver. The conductor says, as the hearse driver said, “Just room for one inside, sir.” The man backs away. The bus leaves without him and everyone inside dies in a subsequent crash.
*** West Wing Connection to dime and Roosevelt link to Lincoln penny
An intelligent, comely New York girl of twenty-odd summers was invited for the first time to the Carolina estate of some distant relatives. She looked forward to the visit and bought quite an extensive wardrobe with which to impress her Southern cousins.
The plantation fulfilled her fondest expectations. The grounds, the manor house, the relatives themselves were perfect. She was assigned to a room in the western wing, and prepared to retire for the night in the glow of satisfaction. Her room was drenched with light of a full moon. Outside was a gravel roadway which curved up the main entrance of the building.
Just as she was climbing into her bed, she was startled by the sound of horses’ hooves on the gravel roadway. She walked to the window, and saw, to her astonishment, a magnificent old coach, drawn by four coal-black horses, pull up sharply directly in front of her window. The coachman jumped from his perch, looked up, and pointed a long, bony finger at her. He was hideous. His face was chalk white. A deep scar ran the length of his left cheek. His nose was beaked. As he pointed at her, he droned in spectral tones: “There is room for one more!” Then, as she recoiled in terror, the coach, the horses and the ominous coachman disappeared completely. The roadway stretched empty before her in the moonlight.
The girl slept little that night, but in the reassuring sunlight of the following morning, she was able to convincer herself that the sight she had seen had been nothing more than a nightmare, or an obsession caused by a disordered stomach. She said nothing about it to her hosts.
The next night, however, provided an exact repletion of the first night’s procedure. The same coach drove up the roadway. The same coachman pointed to her and croaked: “There is room for one more!” Then the entire equipage disappeared again.
The girl, in complete panic, could scarcely wait for morning. She trumped up some excuse to her hosts, and rushed back to New York. Her doctor hand an office on the eighteenth floor of a modern medical center. She taxied there from the station, and told him her story in tremulous tones.
The doctor’s mater-of-fact acceptance of her tale did much to quiet her nerves. He persuaded her that she has been the victim of a peculiar hallucination, laughed at her terror, kissed her paternally on the brow, and dismissed her in a state of infinite relief. She rang the bell for the elevator, and a door swung open before her.
The elevator was very crowded. She was about to squeeze her way inside when a familiar voice rang in her hear. “There is room for one more!” it said. She saw his chalk-white face, the livid scar, the beaked nose! She drew back and screamed, and the elevator door banged shut in her face.
A moment later the building shook with a terrific crash. The elevator that had gone on without her broke loose from its cables and plunged eighteen stories to the ground. Everybody in it, of course, was crushed to a pulp.
***
In “The Hearse Driver” the man in the clinic recovering from a race car accident makes a joke of having recurring nightmares about his nurse. He has the hots for her and he says that he keeps dreaming she turns him down and marries the doctor. Time in his vision is marked by the hands of a clock. There are no elevators and the hideous aspects of the man in uniform who personifies death disappear. In the Dead of Night wraparound story, a psychiatrist habitually takes off his eyeglasses and toward the end of the movie the glasses shatter.
In “Twenty Two” the woman in the hospital is a dancer with recurring nightmares about her nurse that are no joke. She’s not even convinced nightmare is a dream. The sound of horse hooves outside of the window in “The Hearse Driver” is replaced by the sound of the nurse’s rubber-soled shoes on the tiled floor of the hallway. The dancer’s agent, rather than the doctor, habitually takes off his glasses. Time is marked by an unvarying sequence of events that include a broken glass of water and the ticking of a clock. An elevator takes the nurse, followed by the dancer to the basement where the nurse bursts through the swinging doors of room 22 – the morgue, stares at her and says, “Room for one more, honey.”
There is always room for one more version of Dufferin’s ghost story. You can find something from all of the above including a clock, an elevator, a Ghost, a key pared with “change,” an artist, a dancer a model and other details in Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood. –Jasper
Footnotes:
Moonlight Mezzaluna, the restaurant where Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson ate their last meal took its name from the Italian word meaning "half moon." In 1992 Mark Fuhrman and Bill Pavelic worked on the same moonlighting job for Johnny Carson. The TV series Moonlighting with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis has numerous prop, theme, scenario, dialogue and actor links to Mark Fuhrman.
Taxied from the station In Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich movie, former Greenwich Police Det. Steve Carroll uses his old, private car as a taxi and drives Fuhrman and his writing partner Stephen Weeks from the Greenwich Train Station to their motel.
Crash Mark Fuhrman was in the LAPD C.R.A.S.H. unit when he told his second wife that his job was to annihilate gang members. In Murder in Greenwich he and Weeks crash a party at the Bell Haven Country Club.
Elevator The elevator connection to Fuhrman is one that he made explicitly in the first chapter of his first book. There is also a subtle English connection to Fuhrman, an elevator and an airport (key elements in "Twenty Two") in his movie. It happens in a bar (where people get "high") with Steve Carroll asking Fuhrman if he wanted a lift to the airport. A "lift" is an English word for elevator.
Murder in Brentwood, Chapter 1, Nolo Contendere: "On Wednesday, October 2, 1996, I walked into the criminal courts building in downtown Los Angeles to face charges of perjury. In twenty years on the LAPD, I had spent a lot of time there, testifying, filing cases, and waiting in the cafeteria. I had participated in hundreds of trials, but had always been on the side of the prosecution. Now I was the accused... As I rode the elevator up to the ninth floor, these familiar surroundings became less comfortable... "
Cable Search “cable” all instances Smoke_3/smoke_3_chap_25.htm
Plunged When you search for Fuhrman links in movies and TV shows to something he said or did to promote himself, you frequently find things that you hadn't thought of. because you didn't know how to look at them. Figurative expressions, for instance, are as likely as not to show up as literal action and vice-versa. Someone in a figuratively high position of influence literally plunging to his death from a great physical height is a strikingly repetitive example. In The Big Clock it's a newspaper publisher who falls down an open elevator shaft.
Eighteen stories The double meaning of 18 stories could go to many place with Fuhrman but one destination is certain – The Twilight Zone. –Jasper |
