Voices from The Twilight Zone: Long Distance Call
By Pat Brennan
Previous ⬅ Voices from The Twilight Zone: The Purple Testament
Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on my grampy’s lap at the kitchen table of the small bungalow my mom and I shared with him. Sometimes Cliff (“Derb” to his friends) would be holding court, spinning profanity-laced yarns which usually left the folks visiting us that day cackling with laughter. Other times, I’d watch as he demonstrated on one of his massive hands how to play five-finger-fillet (the knife game made notorious by James Cameron’s Aliens) which he learned during his time as a merchant marine in WWII. But more often than not in these memories, we’re just silently enjoying each other’s company. He’d read the newspaper, and I’d nibble away at some treat he’d brought home for me, or sometimes fall asleep against his chest.
Those moments were filled with a perfect kind of contentedness that I later learned is a rare commodity in life. When grampy passed away suddenly from a heart attack, his absence didn’t make sense to me. The world was the same but askew somehow. The leveling of this mountain of a man left the landscape of my reality forever altered in a way I couldn’t wrap my five-year-old mind around. How could he be gone?
An answer to that question came to my mom and me over the course of the months and years that passed after his death.
Maybe he wasn’t.
“Long Distance Call,” the twenty-second installment of The Twilight Zone’s sophomore season, admittedly falls short of consideration in terms of being a classic. However, the eeriness of its premise and the strength of its performances combine to create a story that deftly works its way underneath your skin despite its faults. This is a tale that examines grief through the eyes of a child and warns of the terrible ways in which loneliness can corrupt even the purest of loves. And, on top of all that, it’s a banger of a ghost story, possibly one of the strongest to appear during The Twilight Zone’s five-year run.
It’s a big day in the Bayles household; Billy (Bill Mumy) has reached the ripe old age of five, and his family is celebrating the day accordingly. A beautiful cake takes center stage on their dining room table, party hats are doled out, and the child is surrounded by the love of his father (Philip Abbot), mother (Patricia Smith), and grandmother (Lili Darvas). The eldest of the Bayles clan hands Billy a present, which he tears into with a verve characteristic of all children that age. What he finds inside is a toy telephone, one which his grandmother informs him can be used to contact her anytime, anywhere.
Moments after this exchange, the day takes a tragic turn when Billy’s grandmother falls gravely ill and passes away. The household attempts to grapple with the loss of its matriarch, but soon something strange begins to take place as Billy and his new toy become inseparable. He spends hours up in his room talking to a voice his parents cannot hear, one that he says belongs to his grandmother. The child becomes more and more erratic, and his parents are left to question whether his behavior is borne of grief or something much worse.
What stands out immediately in this episode are its performances, specifically those of Darvas and Mumy. The former, despite only being in it for just over a quarter of its runtime, gives her character an impressive sense of dimension. The grandmother is all kisses and hugs on the surface, but there’s also a playful defiance underneath that warm exterior, as best illustrated by her wonderful delivery of the line, “I always follow the rules of the house…unless I don’t like them.” Mumy is similarly nuanced in his turn as Billy. He’s painfully cute, yes, but there’s a melancholic contemplation to the boy after his grandmother dies that feels unexpectedly true to life. This would be the first of Mumy’s three appearances on The Twilight Zone (most fans will remember him as the diabolic Anthony in “It’s a Good Life”) and its strength makes it no surprise he would return to the show.
Coupled with the quality of its performances is the effectiveness of its simple but deeply chilling premise. Initially written by William Idelson (who would go on to work on programs like The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle) and further refined by the legendary Charles Beaumont (who will definitely appear again in future installments of this series), “Long Distance Call” taps into our fearful longing to know of what’s waiting for us after we die. It’s also a story about the thin line between love and obsession. Grandma Bayles loves Billy dearly, but that emotion is given an unnerving level of intensity because of the sense of isolation that can come with old age and illness. And that feeling evidently intensifies after she dies. “She’s lonesome! She wants to know if I can come stay with her,” exclaims Billy to his terrified mother, showcasing the horrifying measures Grandma Bayles is willing to take to feel a connection again.
What drags “Long Distance Call” down are issues that were beyond its control. Twenty-five minutes just doesn’t feel like enough time to explore its themes. After the emotional groundwork is laid at the beginning and the tragedy of the grandmother’s passing takes place, the supernatural aspects of the narrative and their escalation come off as rushed. On top of this, “Long Distance Call” was thankfully the last of The Twilight Zone episodes to be filmed on videotape rather than film. Done in an attempt to cut budgetary costs, the difference between the two is painfully obvious. Beyond the cheap quality it gives to the visuals, using videotape greatly limited the creative options directors had for telling their stories. Editing techniques for the material, which was still in its infancy, were basically non-existent, so these entries were shot as if they were a live performance. The end result was television that was narratively imaginative but visually dull.
Still, the story itself has an undeniable power to it, which is why it’s so memorable. Divorced from its supernatural aspects, what the Bayle family endures is painfully universal. The vast majority of us have lost someone we’ve loved, and we all dream of what it would be like to hear that person’s voice once more.
One day, about a year or so after grampy left us, I heard a noise while playing with my Swamp Thing toys inside the pantry of our kitchen. I remember sticking my head out from the cupboard and listening to the sound as it drifted in the air. It was recognizable somehow, and soon I was following it across the room and to the doorway that led downstairs to the basement. I moved closer until I was standing at the top of the steps. Peering down into the darkness, I discovered that the noise was coming from what had been my grampy’s workshop. The room had been left to gather dust as my mother didn’t have the emotional or physical energy to clean it out. He used to spend hours down there, tinkering away at some project or testing a new gadget he had bought, and what I was hearing was pretty damn close to the sounds that emanated from the room when he was in it. I don’t know how long I stood there listening but eventually, my eyes filled with tears, my hands began to shake, and I stepped away slowly from those familiar metallic tones. A minute later, I found my mom napping on our living room couch and wriggled in next to her. I tried to replace the sound from our basement with the steady rhythm of her breathing and, while watching the paperback novel resting on her chest rise then fall, eventually the fear subsided.
There were other incidents. Some were experienced by me, others by my mother. We didn’t talk too much about them (our little family had bigger things to deal with, unfortunately), but I think we both knew that something was happening. Today, the logical side of me can come up with explanations for everything that took place in those years. Perception is easily malleable, and time makes its additions and subtractions to what is thought to be even the most concrete of memories. But I don’t think I’ll ever shut the door on my hope that what I heard was real or that if I could stand at the top of those stairs today, I might hear it again. I think Rod Serling’s closing narration for “Long Distance Call” sums it up best:
“A toy telephone, an act of faith, a set of improbable circumstances, all combine to probe a mystery, to fathom a depth, to send a facet of light into a dark after-region, to be believed or disbelieved, depending on your frame of reference. A fact or a fantasy, a substance or a shadow — but all of it very much a part of The Twilight Zone.” 🩸
Sources
Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. Silman-James Press, 2018.
Rubin, Steven Jay. The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia. Chicago Review Press, 2018.
About
Pat Brennan is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, and Rue Morgue. He lives in New Brunswick with his wife, son, and very needy cat. Follow him on Instagram @ horrordad87.
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