Free The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories by Rod Serling

life felt so free, so unencumbered, and so absolutely healthy.
    This reminded Bedeker of his tray, with all its medicines, bottles, jars, lotions, and his book, How To Be Happy Though Bedridden . He picked them up and hurled them out the window, smiling as after a few seconds, he heard the bottles smash on the pavement fourteen stories below. Turning from the window, he noticed the hot water pipes. A shimmering heat rose from them and they looked brick red in the lamp light. He approached them gingerly, and stood over them, very slowly raising his hands until he could feel the heat pour into his palms and through his fingers. Red hot, he noted. Red hot .
    “Proof of the pudding,” Bedeker murmured, “and no time like the present!”
    He slammed both palms down on the pipes, listened to the sizzle of the burning flesh, watched the smoke rise in front of his eyes. But there was no sensation of pain. There was no sensation of any kind. He lifted his hands and stared at them. Not a mark. He looked down at the red hot pipes, and laughed aloud. He continued to laugh, his head back, as he walked across the room and threw himself on the bed. He heard the bedroom door open and Ethel stood there staring at him, frightened.
    “Walter,” she said nervously. “Is everything all right?”
    “Is everything all right?” he repeated. “Everything, Ethel, my love, is delightful. Everything is superb. Everything is perfect.”
    He got up and went to the dresser. There was a nail file lying alongside a brush set. He picked it up and smiling happily, jammed the point into his palm. Ethel screamed and fell back against the door.
    Then very slowly she opened her eyes to look at the Cheshire-cat grin on her husband’s face. He held out an unscathed palm.
    “See, my dear? The hand is quicker than the eye! The proof of the pudding! Witness, my dear...the new Walter Bedeker!”
    He started to laugh again, a gusty, roaring, uncontrollable laugh and he paraded back and forth across the room like a rooster in a barnyard. Ethel stood still, her face pale, wondering if she dared leave the room to get to the telephone. Or if at any moment the demented man in front of her might get violent. Her eye fell on the nail file on the dresser. She gasped, bit deep into a knuckle, and looked at Walter in horror. There had been blood on the nail file.

    In the weeks that followed, Ethel Bedeker was never sure whether or not she preferred the old days to these new ones. Or whether perhaps it had been an irreparable mistake to have been married or even born. The “new” Walter Bedeker turned out to be a mystifying individual. True, he no longer betook himself to his bed five times a month and screamed impossible demands. As a matter of fact, he was rarely home any more. But his new behavior was equally disturbing.
    The first indication she got of what might be expected was a phone call from an insurance adjuster attached to a building firm. Walter, it seemed, had been hit by a falling steel “I” beam that weighed about two and a half tons. It had been in the process of being raised by a chain to the tenth floor of an office building under construction. The chain had broken and the beam had fallen three hundred feet to land on Walter’s head and smash him down into the sidewalk. The foreman on the job first had been violently ill, then had walked very slowly toward that spot in the sidewalk where the horror was waiting for him. He covered his eyes because of a normal reluctance to view mangled bodies. He had also peeked between two fingers, because of the equally normal trait of being fascinated by the horrible. He was to be disappointed on both scores, because Walter Bedeker had crawled out from underneath the beam, none the worse for being squashed, except that his clothes were ripped and his hair disheveled. He had thundered at the foreman that he’d better contact his lawyer because there was going to be one helluva whopping suit in the offing.
    It