Episode no. Season 2
Episode 17 Written by Rod Serling Production code 173-3664 | Directed by Jack Smight Featured music stock from Elegy Original air date February 10, 1961 | |
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"Twenty Two" is episode 53 of the American television series The Twilight Zone. The story was adapted by Rod Serling from a short anecdote in the 1944 Bennett Cerf Random House anthology Famous Ghost Stories, which itself was an adaptation of "The Bus-Conductor," a short story by E. F. Benson published in The Pall Mall Magazine in 1906.
Contents
Opening narration
"This is Miss Liz Powell. She's a professional dancer and she's in the hospital as a result of overwork and nervous fatigue. And at this moment we have just finished walking with her in a nightmare. In a moment she'll wake up and we'll remain at her side. The problem here is that both Miss Powell and you will reach a point where it might be difficult to decide which is reality and which is nightmare, a problem uncommon perhaps but rather peculiar to the Twilight Zone."
Plot
Liz Powell, a professional dancer, is hospitalized for exhaustion. She suffers a vivid recurring nightmare in which she is awakened in her hospital room by the loud ticking of a clock. She knocks a glass of water to the floor, shattering it, then follows the sound of footsteps into the hall. She sees a nurse, half hidden in shadow, descend to the basement in the elevator. She follows the nurse down and finds the hospital morgue, room 22. The nurse emerges from the room and says, "Room for one more, honey." Liz screams, flees to the elevator, and the dream ends.
Liz insists the dream is really happening to her. Her doctor tries to assure her that this is impossible. He produces the night nurse who attends the morgue, and the woman looks nothing like the figure from Liz's dream. The doctor suggests that Liz try an experiment in lucid dreaming, and alter one detail of the dream to undo its hold over her.
That night, the dream begins again. Liz visualizes a pack of cigarettes next to the glass of water on the nightstand. When she is awakened by the clock, she reaches for a cigarette instead of the glass. She drops the lighter, and while reaching to retrieve it, her other hand knocks the glass to the floor. The dream continues as before: Liz follows the footsteps into the hall, and follows the sinister nurse down to the morgue.
The next morning, Liz is hysterical. A nurse is required to hold her down while the doctor injects a sedative. The doctor is not convinced that Liz's dream is anything other than the product of her exhaustion, but he comments to the nurse that it is odd that Liz, who has never seen the real morgue, knows that it is room number 22.
After several days' rest, Liz is discharged from the hospital. She goes to the airport to fly to her next booking in Miami Beach. She buys her ticket and is told she will be on Flight 22. Terrified, she begins experiencing sensory details from the dream: she is distracted by the loud ticking of a wall clock that only she can hear, and bumps into a woman carrying a vase. The vase drops to the floor and shatters. Footsteps in the hall seem magnified to her. She crosses the tarmac to her plane and climbs the boarding stairs. As she reaches the top, a stewardess resembling the nurse from the dream emerges from the cabin. She says, "Room for one more, honey." Screaming, Liz stumbles down the stairs and races back to the terminal. Concerned airport staff try to calm her. Outside the window, Flight 22 taxis to the runway, takes off, and explodes in midair.