20 Questions: Night Shift Multiple Choice Quiz | Literature

Answer: A book

Written as a series of correspondence between the inheritor of an estate in Preacher's Corners, Maine in the year 1950 and his recipients, "Jerusalem's Lot" chronicles the days in which Charles Boone comes to live at his new home and discovers an unsettling, small village in the nearby forest. Though warned of the village's insidious nature and the potential hauntings of his own home, he and his servant, Calvin, visit the destination to discover a sacrilegious place. What he unearths is a family history-- his own-- tied to the darkness of Hell, and despite warning to leave Chapelwaite, he finds himself unable to leave as All Saints' Day approaches.

As the letters come to an end, it seems that Boone and Calvin find the source of the noises in their cellar (a pair of ghoulish figures), the truth behind the book in Jerusalem's Lot, and the unearthly, wormlike entity resting beneath the chapel in the village.

The letters are kept with a postscript from Boone's descendant, the last of his family name, who has just inherited Chapelwaite for himself.

The place is dilapidated, he claims, and there appear to be rats in the walls.

Answer: Rats

Hall, working as a picker at an old textile mill, is offered by his boss, Warwick, to work over the Fourth of July shutdown. The plan is to work late at night, cleaning out the basement level since it hasn't been touched for a dozen years. The catch: it's a dirty job that involves flushing the area out with high-powered hoses, and the rats are huge. As the week goes on and more and more men have encounters with the large rats (some of whom leave due to injury), Hall locates a trapdoor accessing a sub-cellar. Forcing Warwick along, they descend into the caverns below to find that not only was it (somehow) locked from the inside, but it's become home to massive rat beasts of all sorts. Before long, Hall brings Warwick too deep inside for both of them to escape; they're quickly eaten by the rats within while the men upstairs unknowingly grab their hoses and head inside to retrieve them.

Answer: Captain Trips

Also featured in "The Stand", Captain Trips, or A6, or 'The Superflu', appears to have spread through the population of the world in "Night Surf" as a group of friends spend a late evening on the beach enjoying each other's company. While they try to bide their time in the sand as the surf rushes in and out, Bernie reflects on the start of their evening, which involved sacrificing a man to the surf, placing him on a pyre when they realized he was infected in an attempt at mercy.

While the group tries to live normally, believing themselves to be immune via the A2 virus, one of them is sick with A6, and it may just be a matter of time before they're all as dead as the rest of the world.

Answer: Venus

This story is recounted out of order through the narration of Arthur, a former astronaut who flew to Venus in a mission to analyze the planet from orbit. After seeing the terrifying planet with his very eyes (referred to in a description as "a skull picked clean and covered in clouds"), he returned to Earth in a complicated reentry that claimed the life of his colleague and left him crippled.

After settling into his new life, things seemed to get concerning; a terrible itch in his hands started to spread to the point where he began seeing monstrous things in his flesh-- eyes with evil intent and powers beyond his capability to control.

After the deaths of a boy near his home and his friend, Richard, he set his hands on fire to quell their urges, and everything was fine until seven years later.

The story is a recounting of events, but also a final word as he plans to commit suicide due to the eyes that have appeared on his chest.

Answer: Laundry folder

Officer Hunton is called to the industrial laundry to find that Adelle Frawley, one of the workers there, has been killed in a workplace accident, somehow getting caught in the Hadley-Watson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder despite the virtually foolproof safety mechanisms on the machine.

It's not the only weird occurrence though; other people have gotten burns, cuts, and tugged by the machine. Sherry Ouellet, one of the younger employees, was even injured to the point of bleeding in the folder.

After someone's arm is torn off in the machine, Officer Hunton and his friend Mark Jackson come to realize that the folder might be the vessel of a demonic possession and amass what they need to stop it, but they seem powerless to flight the spirit within.

As Jackson is eaten, Hunton escapes...and so does the Mangler.

Answer: The closet

Lester Billings makes a visit to a psychiatrist with the intent to have someone prove he killed his three children. He didn't, however. He simply wants to be sent to jail; in jail you can see every nook and cranny and there's nowhere to hide. As he explains, he never saw that he should coddle his children, and that's why his first son was taken. Though he complained about fears of a boogeyman in his closet, he was killed when he was three years old and no one knew quite why.

His daughter died next, a few years later, also complaining of a boogeyman.

This time, Lester thought he saw something slip into the closet when he checked her room. His third child was conceived accidentally. He feared that the boogeyman would return for him too and wasn't surprised when it did. Doctor Harper asks him to speak to his secretary; they need to have appointments on a regular bases.

When Lester leaves the room, however, no one's in the waiting room. As the therapist removes his mask, it becomes clear that the Boogeyman has been lurking close all along.

Answer: A bad batch of beer

When Tommy Grenadine comes into Henry's Nite-Owl in the middle of a snowstorm and suggests that something is wrong with his father, Henry and two of his regulars grab a gun and a few packs of beer and decide to investigate because, after talking to the boy, Henry is certain something is wrong. At some point over the past few weeks, Richie Grenadine drank what he believed to be a bad batch of beer. What followed was the slow degradation of his body as he morphed from human to something less so. Tommy only really picked up on the fact when he came home from school early to spy his dad moving like an inhuman blob around the apartment and eating dead animals.

When Henry and the others arrive at the Grenadine apartment, they find that Richie is certainly too far gone. He's progressed to the point of eating other people. While Henry fires his weapon, the other men notice that Richie appears to be splitting into two and they run. They make it back to the Nite-Owl, but both are uncertain if the split is something that can keep happening or if Henry made it out alive.

Answer: A thermonuclear device

A professional hitman, Mr. Renshaw, heads home to find, to his surprise, that a package has arrived at this apartment-- a mysterious G.I. Joe Vietnam Footlocker containing a slew of army men and accessories. It takes next to no time investigating the contents before the soldiers therein spring to life, firing at him with smaller-scale, but no-less-deadly ammunition.

He's forced to retreat into his bathroom and maneuver around the fortieth-floor ledges outside his building to avoid their wrath, but it's no use. With no surrender he has to fight through the forces.

He tosses a molotov cocktail at the toys in the living room, but the soldiers are able to detonate the box's most advanced secret: a scale-model thermonuclear device.

Answer: Morse code

Trapped in a rest stop diner, a group of survivors take shelter while half a dozen large trucks circle the building, driverless, waiting to kill the humans that remain. Although the reasons why vehicles have become sentient is left unexplained, it's clear that the situation is life-or-death; anyone who goes outside is at risk of being hit and killed. Some people rush outside in an attempt to flee, but they don't get far; the trucks are too fast.

While the survivors plot out their survival, the power goes out. There are opportunities to risk it for water from the unattached bathrooms next to the diner, but the chances slim when more trucks show up and a bulldozer threatens to destroy the building. When the trucks start to communicate in morse code to indicate that they need refuelling, the group makes one last-ditch effort to evade a life of slavery...but it's no use. As the story comes to a close, the three remaining survivors realize that they simply have to wait out their time, pumping gas into the vehicles as they line up down the road.

Answer: English

High school teacher Jim Norman begins a new job after a tumultuous breakdown, teaching English at a school that is clearly not without its problems. When one of Jim's students is killed in an accident, the student that replaces him turns out to be a familiar face, that of a boy who bullied him when he was younger as part of a gang attack; the gang killed his brother, Wayne, with a knife. Over the coming weeks, Jim continues to teach, but more students start dying and disappearing under odd circumstances and other boys from the gang start appearing in his class. The plot thickens when Jim has horrible nightmares of the night he and his brother were jumped. He goes so far as to call the policeman who investigated the case twenty years earlier, and after a bit more research discovers that the boys never transferred from another school, but instead from a cemetery in Milford, Connecticut.

As the boys' threats escalate, Jim does his research and supposes he can bring an end to their haunting. After his wife is killed by the boys he invites them to the school to end it, sacrifices his body parts to the beyond, and commences a ritual to force the ghouls to relive the night they killed his brother before banishing them to the other side. Hopefully, he believes, they're gone for good, but sometimes they come back.

Answer: Springheel Jack

The narrator chronicles the events that occurred when he attended New Sharon College. During one year there, the area experienced a 'strawberry spring', a warming period near the end of winter that would be followed by a severe winter blast. During that time, occurring perhaps once a decade, the region would be warm, wet, and foggy. It was during this particular season that the narrator believed something was lurking out in the shadows in the fog. Sure enough, a number of girls on campus were killed on these nights though the police could never figure out who did it despite a number of leads.

Eight years later, the narrator is afraid to open the trunk of his car. Another strawberry spring has occurred and he can't remember how he made it home in the fog. A local girl is missing.

Answer: Going to jail

Caught having an affair with the wife of a rich criminal overlord, Stan is brought to the man's apartment building for a bet. If Stan can walk around the ledge of the building, high up around the penthouse apartment, and make it back to the balcony at his starting point, he'll be allowed to go and be with his wife. Stan, realizing he'll be framed and sent to prison if he doesn't comply, ends up traversing the narrow ledge, somehow managing to brave the cold weather, birdlife, and distractions posed to him by the apartment owner.

When he somehow makes it back to the balcony, he's let back inside but informed that the girl he was fighting for was killed long before he stepped foot in the apartment; he won't go to jail, but there's no one to go back to. Stan manages to fight against the criminal's bodyguard and grab his gun.

The story ends with Stan forcing the man out onto the ledge. If he survives the trip, he says, he'll let him go; in his head he knows he won't.

Answer: Pan

When Harold Parkette's lawn starts to get just a bit out of hand he realizes that, since his former gardener is no longer offering services, he needs to find a replacement. He contacts a new gardener via a classified ad for 'Pastoral Greenery' and when the odd man arrives at his door to begin the job, he thinks little of it and heads off for a rest.

When he later checks on the gardener, an unseemly sight waits for him-- the lawnmower is running on its own, running over living creatures; the gardener, naked, crawls on his hands and knees eating the mowed lawn. Harold calls the police, but the gardener, claiming to be brought forth by the God of the wild, Pan, kills him with his lawnmower.

The police arrive only to find the remains.

Answer: Cigarettes

Dick, passing through an airport one day, runs into an old college friend at the bar who, interestingly, looks the best he's ever looked. The man attributes his success to a group in New York City known as Quitters, inc., an addiction firm whose services are spread by word of mouth from past clients. Dick forgets about it for quite a while, eventually going to their offices on a whim when he has a rough go at work. What he finds there is a no-nonsense plan built around his circumstances. Quitters, Inc. will set him up and create a form of aversion therapy that he will stick to-- most people do-- or else he and his family will be harmed little by little. And what he finds is that Quitters, Inc. knows when he's lying.

After his wife is electrocuted in their office as punishment for his falling off the wagon, he knows he has no choice but to continue abstaining...even when they start giving him diet pills to keep to a specific weight.

Despite the severity of the treatment, at least he can claim it works.

Answer: Voodoo doll

Elizabeth, trying to make it through college with passing grades, finds herself in a unique circumstance when another student, Ed Hamner, Jr., takes a liking to her, tries to get closer, and helps her get test results that allow her to ace her exams. When she heads home for the summer she seems to forget about Ed, but the events of her life seem to lead back to him in uncanny ways. After the tragic death of her fiancé, Elizabeth is comforted by Ed, who manages to wait on her every need, almost anticipating things about her no one ever could.

But Elizabeth's roommate manages to dig up info on Ed leading both girls to discover that something is clearly not alright, and when Elizabeth goes to his house and searches through his closets and belongings, she finds a voodoo doll in a case, hidden away, with a lock of her hair that must have been cut from her head when she was a little girl. She crushes the doll in front of him before departing, breaking the hold he would otherwise keep on her.

Answer: Nebraska

Travelling across the U.S. in an effort to save their marriage, Burt and Vicky head through Nebraska en route to visit family in California, and it's during this drive that they pass through Gatlin. The place seems deserted, but something is amiss. The couple seem to hit a child in their vehicle, but it appears he was killed before they hit him. The shops only seem to contain items from decades earlier. The church contains books of names and dates, none of which list people older than 19 years of age. As they discover, when Vicky is pulled from their car outside, the town is overseen by children sacrificing bodies to He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Vicky is killed and left crucified in the cornfields and Burt, in an attempt to escape, finds himself unable to get out of the rapidly-enclosing rows.

The children of Gatlin come together to discuss the situation. The corn is pleased with the sacrifice but it is not enough. As they cull their people down and set the maximum age of its citizenry to 18, some contemplate setting fire to the fields...though they never would, as He Who Walks Behind the Rows would know.

Answer: Larry's sister

When Larry and his sister used to play in the barn on their property, they used to defy their parents by climbing the ladder to the rafters and jumping from the top beams into a pile of hay on the ground floor. One day, the ladder broke while his sister was climbing and she held on, several storeys up, while he piled the hay by hand under her landing spot. When he told her to jump, she did. Somehow, she managed to survive, only breaking her ankle. They never played that game again.

His sister grew up and, after he moved away, she moved to California. He lost track of her for quite a while. Between ignoring her early letters and losing others due to address changes, he never knew how much help she needed. If he had known that she felt she was living her last days holding onto the last rung of her ladder, he would have helped.

Answer: Norma

Walking through New York City, a man stops off at a Third Avenue flower cart to pick up flowers for Norma. He plans on getting a cheap bouquet, but the florist convinces him to buy the nicer, more expensive flowers. It's a good choice; he wants to make an impression, and everyone on the street notices how lovestruck he must be.

The man walks down an alley to find who he claims is Norma, but she says it isn't her name. As he approaches she isn't quick enough to notice the hammer concealed on his person. She may not actually be Norma, but she's the fifth victim in his list of 'lovers'.

Answer: Jerusalem's Lot

Booth was at Tookey's bar in Falmouth, Maine on one stormy, winter night when Gerard Lumley, having wrecked his car near the outskirts of 'Salem's Lot, stumbled to the establishment looking for help while his wife and daughter waited in the vehicle. Though the men insisted they couldn't get out to the car until morning at the soonest, neither could explain why-- 'Salem's Lot was known for its recently-reemerging denizens and his family was likely already gone if they opened the doors to their car.

When they found the spot where his car was waiting, no one was inside. Though the men knew better Gerard raced off, following their tracks, to find his wife waiting for him. His daughter stayed back to subdue the locals but they managed to escape by throwing a Bible at her and driving off.

Tookey would pass away a few years later, but Booth would still be haunted, in his dreams, by Lumley's daughter. He still warns people to stay away from Jerusalem's Lot, if only to avoid the chance of sealing their fate.

Answer: Pills

A man visits his mother in the hospital and it's apparent that she is unlikely to leave it. While her health continues to decline, he discusses the situation with his brother and continues to make his stops at her room. While some days are easier, some days are worse. On his final visit he brings her her purse and shows her where he's placed a bottle of stronger painkillers. With a clear understanding between the both of them, he places several tablets into her mouth and allows her to hold her belongings.

He kisses her goodbye and rubs his fingerprints clean from the bottle before departing. All he has left to do is wait for the call at home. There's not much else he could have done to help.