“Witness, my dear… the new Walter Bedeker!”
In Rod Serling’s short story “Escape Clause,” we meet the same insufferable bathrobe-wearing, bedridden, forty-four-year-old hypochondriac as found in The Twilight Zone episode of the same name. Walter Bedeker is a demanding and annoying husband. Despite his wife Ethel’s best efforts, Walter’s fears are many: “death, disease, other people, germs, drafts and everything else… In short, he was a gnome-faced little man who clutched at disease the way most people hunger for security” (33). In fact, his phobias are so severe that Walter even refuses to allow windows to be opened inside his house. He verbally berates a doctor, then a janitor, and his own wife before finally being left alone in his room when suddenly he hears the deep, resonant, laughing voice of a man named Cadwallader from inside his room.
Cadwallader is soon revealed to be the devil, himself, offering Walter Bedeker immortality in exchange for his soul. And after a serious negotiation, Walter signs away his soul and begins testing his invincibility in a series of ludicrous challenges, each more radical than the last. Unfortunately, his newfound freedom from fear makes him equally as insufferable a man. He soon faces a new kind of monotony in his life. Without the looming threat of death, he devises a dark plot wherein he kills his wife and winds up in prison in Kansas. In despair, Walter exercises his “escape clause” in his contract with Cadwallader and he immediately dies. As it turns out life without death is empty and meaningless for Walter Bedeker.
Overall the short story closely mirrors the plot featured in its component Twilight Zone episode. Once again, the tone of this Serling tale is light-hearted, whimsical, amusing, and playful up until the point Walter kills his wife and winds up in jail, begging for his own death. This story marks another wonderful folkloric, supernatural, Faustian fable taking place within a modern context.
Serling, Rod. Stories From The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling Books: 1960 (republished in 1990 by the Serling family), Paperback Edition.
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Click here to read my review of The Twilight Zone episode “Escape Clause”
Seems a pity he can’t achieve death without killing his long suffering wife! But it’s a fascinating idea, the transformation of a fearful person to someone who has nothing to fear but boredom.