“I can’t find them. They’re gone. I can’t even prove they existed.”
The loose thematic inspiration for The Twilight Zone episode “And When The Sky Was Opened,” Richard Matheson’s short story entitled “Disappearing Act” is uniquely distinct from The Twilight Zone episode that it inspired. Both the episode and the story explore a terrifying supernatural phenomenon in which people start mysteriously disappearing without a trace, driving a protagonist mad with angst. Matheson’s short story describes a notebook found sitting on a Brooklyn candy shop counter two weeks ago beside a half-empty cup of coffee. The words in the notebook reveal the first-person perspective of “Bob,” an ambiguous man who has been frantically writing his thoughts and memories as people close to him start disappearing and no one seems to remember them.
According to the writings found in the notebook, Bob is a New York writer who has taken on a night typing job. He is facing a troubled marriage with his wife Mary, and has been having an affair with a woman named Jean Lane who works at a magazine called “No Design Handbook.” Bob’s friend Jim keeps offering him a full-time job at another magazine, but Bob continues to reject the offer.
Then Bob starts getting a strange feeling. He phones up his mistress Jean but strangely the operator cannot connect them. She doesn’t recognize that name. He then calls Jean’s magazine, but the secretary says there has never been anyone by that name working there. Bob is perturbed as he learns Jean has completely disappeared. Even Bob’s friend Mike doesn’t recall ever meeting a “Jean,” even though they went on a double-date together. Then the same thing happens to Bob’s other friend, Dave. He disappears from all recorded existence. And then Bob’s bank book gets suddenly erased in real-time. He is laughed out of the bank and then his wife Mary doesn’t even come home from work (when Bob phones up her office, nobody recognizes her name). Suddenly, Bob is alone and aware that he is going mad.
In the end, Bob’s house disappears, the VA claims to have no record of him, and all of his family vanishes from recorded memory. Bob sits down in a candy shop, awaiting the inevitable and writing in a notebook, and the story ends with his final unfinished sentence that reads:
“I’m having a cup of cof”
Before he can even finish his sentence, Bob has disappeared, too. This eerie anxious sense of disappearance is also wonderfully captured in the corresponding Twilight Zone episode of the same name (“And When The Sky Was Opened”), only instead of a solo person named Bob writing in a notebook, in the corresponding episode, Rod Serling introduces us to three astronauts who have crash-landed in the desert. But one by one, they each start disappearing from all recorded history. In both the story and the episode, a classic horror theme comes to light: the notion of total eradication. Few things are more terrifying than the prospect of being completely erased and forgotten about by everyone. It’s another unsettling and sobering idea from one of the great Twilight Zone writers, Richard Matheson.
Matheson, Richard. “Disappearing Act” as found in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories by Richard Matheson. Tor, a Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York, New York, 2002. Dedicated to “Stephen King, with much admiration for taking the ball and running with it all the way.”
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Click here for my review of The Twilight Zone episode “And When The Sky Was Opened.”
The inspirations we learn about nowadays for Twilight Zone classics can be quite amazing. Thank you for including this one particularly.