Flight or Fright Read online

  Children, I thought, just children.

  I ran past Hernandez and Pembry to the comfort pallet. I can’t tell you what they saw in my face, but if it was anything like what I saw in the little mirror above the latrine sink, I would have been at once terrified and redeemed.

  I looked from the mirror to the interphone. Any problem with the cargo should be reported immediately—procedure demanded it—but what could I tell the AC? I had an urge to drop it all, just eject the coffins and call it a day. If I told them there was a fire in the hold, we would drop below ten thousand feet so I could blow the bolts and send the whole load to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, no questions asked.

  I stopped then, straightened up, tried to think. Children, I thought. Not monsters, not demons, just the sounds of children playing. Nothing that will get you. Nothing that can get you. I tossed off the shiver that ran through my body and decided to get some help.

  At the bunk, I found Hadley still asleep. A dog-eared copy of a paperback showing two women locked in a passionate embrace lay like a tent on his chest. I shook his arm and he sat up. Neither of us said anything for a moment. He rubbed his face with one hand and yawned.

  Then he looked right at me and I watched his face arch into worry. His next action was to grab his portable oxygen. He recovered his game face in an instant. “What is it, Davis?”

  I groped for something. “The cargo,” I said. “There’s a … possible shift in the cargo. I need a hand, sir.”

  His worry snapped into annoyance. “Have you told the AC?”

  “No sir,” I said. “I—I don’t want to trouble him yet. It may be nothing.”

  His face screwed into something unpleasant and I thought I’d have words from him, but he let me lead the way aft. Just his presence was enough to revive my doubt, my professionalism. My walk sharpened, my eyes widened, my stomach returned to its place in my gut.

  I found Pembry sitting next to Hernandez now, both together in a feigned indifference. Hadley gave them a disinterested look and followed me down the aisle between the coffins.

  “What about the main lights?” he asked.

  “They don’t help,” I said. “Here.” I handed him the flashlight and asked him, “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Just listen.”

  Again, only engines and the Jetstream. “I don’t …”

  “Shhh! Listen.”

  His mouth opened and stayed there for a minute, then shut. The engines quieted and the sounds came, dripping over us like water vapor, the fog of sound around us. I didn’t realize how cold I was until I noticed my hands shaking.

  “What in the hell is that?” Hadley asked. “It sounds like—”

  “Don’t,” I interrupted. “That can’t be it.” I nodded at the metal boxes. “You know what’s in these coffins, don’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything. The sound seemed to filter around us for a moment, at once close, then far away. He tried to follow the sound with his light. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

  “No. I’m just glad you hear it too, sir.”

  The engineer scratched his head, his face drawn, like he swallowed something foul and couldn’t lose the aftertaste. “I’ll be damned,” he drawled.

  All at once, as before, the sound stopped, and the roar of the jets filled our ears.

  “I’ll hit the lights.” I moved away hesitantly. “I’m not going to call the AC.”

  His silence was conspiratorial. As I rejoined him, I found him examining a particular row of coffins through the netting.

  “You need to conduct a search,” he said dully.

  I didn’t respond. I’d done midair cargo searches before, but never like this, not even on bodies of servicemen. If everything Pembry said was true, I couldn’t think of anything worse than opening one of these caskets.

  We both started at the next sound. Imagine a wet tennis ball. Now imagine the sound a wet tennis ball makes when it hits the court—a sort of dull THWAK—like a bird striking the fuselage. It sounded again, and this time I could hear it inside the hold. Then, after a buffet of turbulence, the thump sounded again. It came clearly from a coffin at Hadley’s feet.

  Not a serious problem, his face tried to say. We just imagined it. A noise from one coffin can’t bring a plane down, his face said. There are no such things as ghosts.

  “Sir?”

  “We need to see,” he said.

  Blood pooled in my stomach again. See, he had said. I didn’t want to see.

  “Get on the horn and tell the AC to avoid the chop,” he said. I knew at that moment he was going to help me. He didn’t want to, but he was going to do it anyway.

  “What are you doing?” Pembry asked. She stood by as I removed the cargo netting from the row of caskets while the engineer undid the individual straps around that one certain row. Hernandez slept head bowed, the downers having finally taken effect.

  “We have to examine the cargo,” I stated matter-of-factly. “The flight may have caused the load to become unbalanced.”

  She grabbed my arm as I went by. “Was that all it was? A shifting load?”

  There was a touch of desperation in her question. Tell me I imagined it, the look on her face said. Tell me and I’ll believe you, and I’ll go get some sleep.

  “We think so,” I nodded.

  Her shoulders dropped and her face peeled into a smile too broad to be real. “Thank God. I thought I was going crazy.”

  I patted her shoulder. “Strap in and get some rest,” I told her. She did.

  Finally, I was doing something. As Loadmaster, I could put an end to this nonsense. So I did the work. I unstrapped the straps, climbed the other caskets, shoved the top one out of place, carried it, secured it, removed the next one, carried it, secured it, and again. The joy of easy repetition.

  It wasn’t until we got to the bottom one, the noisy one, that Hadley stopped. He stood there watching me as I pulled it out of place enough to examine it. His stance was level, but even so it spoke of revulsion, something that, among swaggering Air Force veterans and over beers, he could conceal. Not now, not to me.

  I did a cursory examination of the deck where it had sat, of the caskets next to it, and saw no damage or obvious flaws.

  A noise sounded—a moist “thunk.” From inside. We flinched in unison. The engineer’s cool loathing was impossible to conceal. I suppressed a tremble.

  “We have to open it,” I said.

  The engineer didn’t disagree, but like me, his body was slow to move. He squatted down and, with one hand firmly planted on the casket lid, unlatched the clasps on his end. I undid mine, finding my finger slick on the cold metal, and shaking a little as I pulled them away and braced my hand on the lid. Our eyes met in one moment that held the last of our resolve. Together we opened the casket.

  FIRST, the smell: a mash of rotten fruit, antiseptic, and formaldehyde, wrapped in plastic with dung and sulfur. It stung our nostrils as it filled the hold. The overhead lights illuminated two shiny black body bags, slick with condensation and waste. I knew these would be the bodies of children, but it awed me, hurt me. One bag lay unevenly concealing the other, and I understood at once that there was more than one child in it. My eyes skimmed the juice-soaked plastic, picking out the contour of an arm, the trace of a profile. A shape coiled near the bottom seam, away from the rest. It was the size of a baby.

  Then the plane shivered like a frightened pony and the top bag slid away to reveal a young girl, eight or nine at the most, half in and half out of the bag. Wedged like a mad contortionist into the corner, her swollen belly, showing stab wounds from bayonets, had bloated again, and her twisted limbs were now as thick as tree limbs. The pigment-bearing skin had peeled away everywhere but her face, which was as pure and as innocent as any cherub in heaven.

  Her face was really what drove it home, what really hurt me. Her sweet face.

  My hand fixed itself to the casket edge in painful whiteness, but I dared not remove it. Something caught in my throat and I forced it back down.

  A lone fly, fat and glistening, crawled from inside the bag and flew lazily towards Hadley. He slowly rose to his feet and braced himself, as if against a body blow. He watched it rise and flit a clumsy path through the air. Then he broke the moment by stepping back, his hands flailing and hitting it—I heard the slap of his hand—and letting a nauseous sound escape his lips.

  When I stood up, my temples throbbed and my legs weakened. I held onto a nearby casket, my throat filled with something rancid.

  “Close it,” he said like a man with his mouth full. “Close it.”

  My arms went rubbery. After bracing myself, I lifted one leg and kicked the lid. It rang out like an artillery shell. Pressure pounded into my ears like during a rapid descent.

  Hadley put his hands on his haunches and lowered his head, taking deep breaths through his mouth. “Jesus,” he croaked.

  I saw movement. Pembry stood next to the line of coffins, her face pulled up in sour disgust. “What—is—that—smell?”

  “It’s okay.” I found I could work one arm and tried what I hoped looked like an off-handed gesture. “Found the problem. Had to open it up though. Go sit down.”

  Pembry brought her hands up around herself and went back to her seat.

  I found that with a few more deep breaths, the smell dissipated enough to act. “We have to secure it,” I told Hadley.

  He looked up from the floor and I saw his eyes as narrow slits. His hands were in fists and his broad torso stood fierce and straight. At the corner of his eyes, wetness glinted. He said nothing.

  It became cargo again as I fastened the latches. We strained to fit it back into place. In a matter of minutes, the other caskets were stowed, the exterior straps were in place, the cargo netting draped and secure.

  Hadley waited for me to finish up, then walked forwards with me. “I’m going to tell the AC you solved the problem,” he said, “and to get us back to speed.”

  I nodded.

  “One more thing,” he said. “If you see that fly, kill it.”

  “Didn’t you …”

  “No.”

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “Yes, sir.”

  Pembry sat in her seat, nose wriggled up, feigning sleep. Hernandez sat upright, eyelids half open. He gestured for me to come closer, bend down.

  “Did you let them out to play?” he asked.

  I stood over him and said nothing. In my heart, I felt that same pang I did as a child, when summer was over.

  When we landed in Dover, a funeral detail in full dress offloaded every coffin, affording full funeral rites to each person. I’m told as more bodies flew in, the formality was scrapped and only a solitary Air Force chaplain met the planes. By week’s end I was back in Panama with a stomach full of turkey and cheap rum. Then it was off to the Marshall Islands, delivering supplies to the guided missile base there. In the Military Air Command, there is no shortage of cargo.

  THE HORROR OF THE HEIGHTS

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  In addition to his tales of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle wrote well over a hundred other stories, dozens of them tales of the supernatural. Some of these lack the propulsive, “gotta see what happens next” quality of the Holmes stories, featuring, as most do, upstanding young Englishmen who confront some supernatural horror and triumph through grit and wile, but a few are genuinely scary. “Lot No. 249” is one such; here is another. Like his contemporary, Bram Stoker, Doyle was fascinated by new inventions (he bought a motor car in 1911, without ever having driven one), and that included the aeroplane. When you read “The Horror of the Heights,” remember that it was published in 1913, only ten years after the Wright Brothers’ Flyer lifted off from Kitty Hawk for 59 seconds, with Orville at the rudimentary controls and Wilbur standing by. When Doyle’s story was published in The Strand, the operating ceiling of most planes would have been from 12,000 to perhaps 18,000 feet. Doyle imagined what might be even higher up there, far beyond the clouds, and in doing so created his most terrifying tale.

  The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter. The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts which reinforce the statement. Though the assertions contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation. This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger. I will endeavour in this narrative, which reproduces the original document in its necessarily somewhat fragmentary form, to lay before the reader the whole of the facts up to date, prefacing my statement by saying that, if there be any who doubt the narrative of Joyce-Armstrong, there can be no question at all as to the facts concerning Lieutenant Myrtle, R. N., and Mr. Hay Connor, who undoubtedly met their end in the manner described.

  The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment was found in the field which is called Lower Haycock, lying one mile to the westward of the village of Withyham, upon the Kent and Sussex border. It was on the 15th September last that an agricultural labourer, James Flynn, in the employment of Mathew Dodd, farmer, of the Chauntry Farm, Withyham, perceived a briar pipe lying near the footpath which skirts the hedge in Lower Haycock. A few paces farther on he picked up a pair of broken binocular glasses. Finally, among some nettles in the ditch, he caught sight of a flat, canvas-backed book, which proved to be a note-book with detachable leaves, some of which had come loose and were fluttering along the base of the hedge. These he collected, but some, including the first, were never recovered, and leave a deplorable hiatus in this all-important statement. The note-book was taken by the labourer to his master, who in turn showed it to Dr. J. H. Atherton, of Hartfield. This gentleman at once recognized the need for an expert examination, and the manuscript was forwarded to the Aero Club in London, where it now lies.

  The first two pages of the manuscript are missing. There is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story. It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with the record of Mr. Joyce-Armstrong’s qualifications as an aeronaut, which can be gathered from other sources and are admitted to be unsurpassed among the air-pilots of England. For many years he has been looked upon as among the most daring and the most intellectual of flying men, a combination which has enabled him to both invent and test several new devices, including the common gyroscopic attachment which is known by his name. The main body of the manuscript is written neatly in ink, but the last few lines are in pencil and are so ragged as to be hardly legible—exactly, in fact, as they might be expected to appear if they were scribbled off hurriedly from the seat of a moving aeroplane. There are, it may be added, several stains, both on the last page and on the outside cover which have been pronounced by the Home Office experts to be blood—probably human and certainly mammalian. The fact that something closely resembling the organism of malaria was discovered in this blood, and that Joyce-Armstrong is known to have suffered from intermittent fever, is a remarkable example of the new weapons which modern science has placed in the hands of our detectives.

  And now a word as to the personality of the author of this epoch-making statement. Joyce-Armstrong, according to the few friends who really knew something of the man, was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a mechanic and an inventor. He was a man of considerable wealth, much of which he had spent in the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby. He had four private aeroplanes in his hangars near Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ascents in the course of last year. He was a retiring man with dark moods, in which he would avoid the society of his fellows. Captain Dangerfield, who knew him better than anyone, says that there were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious. His habit of carrying a shot-gun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation of it.

  Another was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration. At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong, according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile: “And where, pray, is Myrtle’s head?”

  On another occasion after dinner, at the mess of the Flying School on Salisbury Plain, he started a debate as to what will be the most permanent danger which airmen will have to encounter. Having listened to successive opinions as to air-pockets, faulty construction, and over-banking, he ended by shrugging his shoulders and refusing to put forward his own views, though he gave the impression that they differed from any advanced by his companions.

  It is worth remarking that after his own complete disappearance it was found that his private affairs were arranged with a precision which may show that he had a strong premonition of disaster. With these essential explanations I will now give the narrative exactly as it stands, beginning at page three of the blood-soaked note-book:

  “Nevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere. I did not actually say what was in my thoughts, but I got so near to it that if they had any corresponding idea they could not have failed to express it. But then they are two empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond seeing their silly names in the newspaper. It is interesting to note that neither of them had ever been much beyond the twenty-thousand-foot level. Of course, men have been higher than this both in balloons and in the ascent of mountains. It must be well above that point that the aeroplane enters the danger zone—always presuming that my premonitions are correct.