Night Gallery

Rod Serling:
Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collectors' item in its own way - not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, and suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.

Rod Serling:
For those of you who've never met me, you might call me the under-nourished Alfred Hitchcock.

Cousin Zachariah:
The trunk... I've come for the trunk.

Himself - Host:
As our third selection, an item from the past. That uniquely American institution known as the pitchman. The wheeler and dealer of magical nostrums guaranteed to cure, to palliate, to bring back the glow of health to everything but a cadaver. Bottled dreams, if you will. Our painting is called *Dr. Stringfellow's Rejuvenator*. Drink hearty

Dr. Ernest Stringfellow:
Well, I'll tell you something about those desert dwellers out there. And for that matter all the citizenry of the soil and every burg on this earth. They've got very short tempers and long memories, and that combination can send a man out into the night on a greasy pole with equal amounts of tar and feathers.

Snyder:
It's *Doctor* Stringfellow.

Dr. Ernest Stringfellow:
I'm afraid that you have the advantage, sir.

Snyder:
Doubtful. I ran out of advantages a long time ago.

Rolpho:
What - what's a resurrection?

Dr. Ernest Stringfellow:
Bringing back of the dead.

Rolpho:
Could you do that? Could you bring her back from the dead?

Dr. Ernest Stringfellow:
My dear moon-struck boy, if there was enough money in it, I would give it one powerful try.

Dr. Ernest Stringfellow:
All right, so it doesn't cure dyspepsia. It has no effect on boils or yellow fever or the dropsy. so what? Do you know what's in Dr. String's Rejuvenator?

Rolpho:
Uh-uh.

Dr. Ernest Stringfellow:
Dreams. Should be on the labels. One part wishful thinking, one part ignorance, and one part the sweat of little men who seek immortality and are dumb enough to think it can be bottled. I should be getting $100 a swallow for that stuff, and a medal at the same time. Because I give hope to the hopeless, dreams to the dreamless. An illusion of health to all the poor doomed yokels who have a dollar in their jeans. I let them get a little peek over the pigsty, a view of Heaven.

Dr. Ernest Stringfellow:
Dr. Snyder here is the protector of the common good. A drunk and a sot and an unhealed healer, but he... he claims to speak for the speechless. You know what I do, brother? I sell faith. I am going to give that child of yours enough belief so that she can kick her way out of a pine coffin if she needs to be. Do you understand me? If that child crosses over into the shadows, I am going to bring her back to life! Now, you go get her.

Snyder:
[Rolpho has just set fire to the late Dr. Stringfellow's medicine wagon] What did you do THAT for?

Rolpho:
Why not? Ain't nothin' in there worth anything. [He and Snyder look at Stringfellow's coffin] Ain't nothin' in there worth anything, either.

Customer:
[as a plump young woman enters and bends before a filing cabinet, her purple-polyester-clad bottom expanding before their eyes as she does so] What about that girl?

Mrs. Mount:
Miss Blodgett - oh. She's only a filing clerk.

Customer:
Doesn't matter.

Mrs. Mount:
She doesn't take shorthand.

Customer:
Makes no difference.

Mrs. Mount:
But she can't type!

Customer:
Nobody's perfect.

Mrs. Mount:
Her handwriting's illegible! She brews a perfectly indigestible cuppa coffee!

Customer:
I think the amount of this check will make further conversation unnecessary, Mrs. Mount.

Mrs. Mount:
You want her? You actually want Miss Blodgett?

Customer:
She is precisely what I have been looking for! - if you'll pardon the prepositional ending.

Himself - Host:
For those of you who've never met me, you might call me the undernourished Alfred Hitchcock. The great British craftsman and I do share something in common. An interest in the oddball. a predilection toward the bizarre. And this place is nothing if it isn't bizarre, by virtue of the paintings you see hanging around me. This item here is called "Since Aunt Ada Came to Stay." And Aunt Ada's a most memorable character. You may not like her, but I seriously doubt if you'll ever forget her. Be thankful you've met her only in... the Night Gallery.

Craig Lowell:
I think it may be entirely logical that I am going mad.