Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales

by Stephen King (ed)

  “Attacks? I thought you said that he had no health problems?”

  “What I actually said was that he was prone to asthma. He did have these stress-related asthma attacks.”

  “So you did. So he began to have an asthma attack? Did he take anything for it?”

  “He carried one of those inhalers around with him. He was vain and thought that none of us knew about it. The great chairman did not like to confess to a physical weakness. So when he had his attacks, he would disappear to treat himself with the inhaler. It was so obvious. Ironic that he had a favorite quotation from Ecclesiastes, ‘Vanitas vanitatum, omnis vanitas’!”

  “So are you saying that he went to the toilet to take his inhaler?”

  “That is what I am saying. After a considerable time had passed, I did get concerned.”

  “Concerned?” Fane smiled thinly. “From what you are telling me, concern about your boss’s well-being was not exactly a priority with you.”

  Tilley lips thinned in a sneer. “Personal feelings do not enter into it. I was not like Elgee, who puts his all into the job. I was being paid to do a job, and I did it with integrity and with professionalism. I did not have to like Harry Gray. It was no concern of mine what Harry Gray did or did not do outside of the job he paid me to do. It did not concern me who his lover was nor who his mortal enemies were.”

  “Very well. So he went to the toilet and did not come back?”

  “As I said, after a while, I called the stewardess and she went to check on him. That was no more nor less the concern of my position as his secretary.”

  “Wait there a moment, Mr. Tilley.”

  Fane moved to where Sally Beech was standing, still pale and slightly nervous, and said quietly: “Do you think you could go to Mr. Gray’s seat and find his attaché case? I’d like you to bring it here.”

  She returned in a short while with a small brown leather case.

  Fane took it to show to Frank Tilley. “Do you identify this as Gray’s case?”

  The man nodded reluctantly. “I don’t think you should do that,” he protested as Fane snapped open the clasps.

  “Why not?”

  “Confidential company property.”

  “I think an investigation into a possible homicide will override that objection.”

  Frank Tilley was surprised. “Homicide?...But that means…murder. No one said anything about murder.”

  Fane was too busy shifting through the papers to respond. He pulled out a sheet and showed it to Tilley. “Was this what he was looking at just before he began to have breathing difficulties?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. It was a piece of paper like it—that’s all I can say.”

  The sheet was a tear sheet from a computer printout. It had two short sentences on it:

  You will die before this aircraft lands. Memento, “homo,” quia pulvis es et in pulverem revertis.

  Fane sat back with a casual smile. He held out the paper to the secretary. “You are a Latin scholar, Mr. Tilley. How would you translate the phrase given here?”

  Tilley frowned. “What makes you say that I am a Latin scholar?”

  “A few moments ago you trotted out a Latin phrase. I presumed that you knew its meaning.”

  “My Latin is almost nonexistent. Mr. Gray was fond of Latin tags and phrases, so I tried to keep up by memorizing some of those he used frequently.”

  “I see. So you don’t know what this one means?”

  Tilley looked at the printed note. He shook his head. “Memento means ‘remember,’ doesn’t it?”

  “Have you ever heard the phrase memento mori? That would be a more popular version of what is written here.”

  Tilley shook his head. “Remember something, I suppose?”

  “Why do you think the Latin word for ‘man’ has quotation marks around it?”

  “I don’t know what it means. I do not know Latin.”

  “What this says roughly is, ‘Remember, man, that you are dust and to dust you will return.’ It was obviously written on a computer, a word processor. Do you recognize the type?”

  Tilley shook his head. “It could be any one of hundreds of company standards. I hope you are not implying that I wrote Mr. Gray a death threat?”

  “How would this have made its way into his attaché case?” Fane said, ignoring the comment.

  “I presume someone put it there.”

  “Who would have such access to it?”

  “I suppose that you are still accusing me? I hated him. But not so that I would cut my own throat. He was a bastard, but he was the goose who laid the golden egg. There was no point in being rid of him.”

  “Just so,” muttered Fane thoughtfully. His eye caught sight of a notepad in the case, and he flicked through its pages while Frank Tilley sat looking on in discomfort. Fane found a list of initials with the head, “immediate dismissal” and that day’s date.

  “A list of half a dozen people that he was about to sack?” Fane observed.

  “I told you that he was going to enjoy a public purge of his executives and mentioned some names to me.”

  “The list contains only initials and starts with O. T. E.” He glanced at Tilley with a raised eyebrow. “Oscar Elgee?”

  “Hardly,” Tilley replied with a patronizing smile. “It means Otis T. Elliott, the general manager of our U.S. database subsidiary.”

  “I see. Let’s see if we can identify the others.”

  He ran through the other initials to which Tilley added names. The next four were also executives of Gray’s companies. The last initials were written as Ft.

  “F. T. is underscored three times with the words ‘no payoff!’ written against it. Who’s F. T.?”

  “You know that F. T. are my initials,” Tilley observed quietly. His features were white and suddenly very grave. “I swear that he never said anything to me about sacking me when we discussed those he had on his list. He never mentioned it.”

  “Well, was there anyone else in the company that the initials F. T. could apply to?”

  Tilley frowned, trying to recall, but finally shook his head and gave a resigned shrug. “No. It could only be me. The bastard! He never told me what he was planning. Some nice little public humiliation, I suppose.”

  Hector Ross emerged from the curtained section and motioned Fane to join him. “I think I can tell you how it was done,” he announced with satisfaction.

  Fane grinned at his friend. “So can I. Tell me if I am wrong. Gray went into the toilet to use his inhaler to relieve an attack of asthma. He placed the inhaler in his mouth, depressed it in the normal way, and…” He ended with a shrug.

  Ross looked shocked. “How did you—?” He glanced over Fane’s shoulder to where Frank Tilley was still sitting, twitching nervously. “Did he confess that he set it up?”

  Fane shook his head. “No. But was I right?”

  “It is a good hypothesis but needs a laboratory to confirm it. I found tiny particles of aluminium in the mouth, and some plastic. Something certainly exploded with force, sending a tiny steel projectile into the back roof of the mouth with such force that it entered the brain and death was instantaneous, as you initially surmised. Whatever had triggered the projectile disintegrated with the force. Hence there were only small fragments embedded in his mouth and cheeks. There were some when I searched carefully, around the cubicle. Diabolical.”

  “This was arranged by someone who knew that friend Gray had a weakness and banked on it. Gray didn’t like to take his inhaler in public and would find a quiet corner. The plan worked out very well and nearly presented an impossible crime, an almost insolvable crime. Initially it appeared that the victim had been shot in the mouth in a locked toilet.”

  Hector Ross smiled indulgently at his colleague. “You imply that you already have the solution?”

 
“Oh yes. Remember the song that we used to sing at school?

  Life is real! Life is earnest!

  And the grave is not its goal;

  Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

  Was not spoken of the soul.”

  Hector Ross nodded. “It’s many a day since I last sang that, laddie. Something by Longfellow, wasn’t it?”

  Fane grinned. “It was, indeed. Based on some lines from the Book of Genesis—‘terra es, terram ibis’—‘dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.’ Get Captain Evans here, please.” He made the request to the Chief Steward, Jeff Ryder, who had been waiting attendance on Ross. When he had departed, Fane glanced back to his friend. “There is something to be said for Latin scholarship.”

  “I don’t follow, laddie.”

  “Our murderer was too fond of the Latin in-jokes he shared with his boss.”

  “You mean his secretary?” He glanced at Frank Tilley.

  “Tilley claims that he couldn’t even translate memento mori.”

  “Remember death?”

  Fane regarded his friend in disapproval. “It actually means ‘remember to die’ and a memento mori is usually applied to a human skull or some other object that reminds us of our mortality.”

  Captain Evans arrived and looked from Fane to Ross in expectation. “Well, what news?”

  “To save any unpleasant scene on the aircraft, Captain, I suggest you radio ahead and have the police waiting to arrest one of your passengers on a charge of murder. No need to make any move until we land. The man can’t go far.”

  “Which man?” demanded Evans, his face grim.

  “He is listed as Oscar Elgee in the tourist class.”

  “How could he—”

  “Simple. Elgee was not only Gray’s manservant but I think you’ll find, from the broad hints Mr. Tilley gave me, that he was also his lover. Elgee seems to confirm it by a death note with a Latin phrase in which he emphasized the word homo, meaning ‘man,’ but, we also know it was often used as a slang term in my generation for ‘homosexual.’”

  “How would you know that Elgee was capable of understanding puns in Latin?” asked Ross.

  “The moment he saw Gray’s body, young Elgee muttered the very words. Terra es, terram ibis—dust you are, to dust you will return.”

  “A quarrel between lovers?” asked Ross. “Love to hatred turned—and all that, as Billy Shakespeare succinctly put it?”

  Fane nodded. “Gray was giving Elgee the push, both as lover and employee, and so Elgee decided to end his lover’s career in midflight, so to speak. There is a note in his attaché case that Elgee was to be sacked immediately without compensation.”

  Tilley, who had been sitting quietly, shook his head vehemently.

  “No there isn’t,” he interrupted. “We went through the list. I told you that the initials O. T. E. referred to Otis Elliott. I had faxed that dismissal through before we boarded the plane.”

  Fane smiled softly. “‘You have forgotten F. T.”

  “But that’s my—”

  “You didn’t share your boss’s passion for Latin tags, did you? It was the F. T. that confused me. I should have trusted that a person with Gray’s reputation would not have written F followed by a lower case t if he meant two initials F. T. I missed the point. It was not your initials at all, Mr. Tilley. It was Ft meant as an abbreviation. Specifically, fac, from facere: ‘to do’; and tatum: ‘all things.’ Factotum. And who was Gray’s factotum?”

  There was a silence.

  “I think we will find that this murder was planned for a week or two at least. Once I began to realize what the mechanism was that killed Gray, all I had to do was look for the person capable of devising that mechanism as well as having motive and opportunity. Hold out your hands, Mr. Tilley.”

  Reluctantly the secretary did so.

  “You can’t seriously see those hands constructing a delicate mechanism, can you?” Fane said. “No, Elgee, the model maker and handyman, doctored one of Gray’s inhalers so that when it was depressed it would explode with an impact into the mouth, shooting a needle into the brain. Simple but effective. He knew that Gray did not like to be seen using the inhaler in public. The rest was left to chance, and it was a good chance. It almost turned out to be the ultimate impossible crime. It might have worked, had not our victim and his murderer been too fond of their Latin in-jokes.”

  The Turbulence Expert

  Stephen King

  Stephen King—that’s me—has written at least two stories about airplane frights. One is called “The Langoliers,” and was made into a TV miniseries. The other, “The Night Flier,” is about a vampire who flies a private airplane instead of turning into a bat. That story was turned into a feature film. This one is brand new.

  1

  Craig Dixon was sitting in the living room of a Four Seasons junior suite, eating expensive room service chow and watching a movie on pay-per-view, when the phone rang. His previously calm heartbeat lost its mojo and sped up. Dixon was unattached, the perfect definition of a rolling stone, and only one person knew he was here in this fancy hotel across from Boston Common. He considered not answering, but the man he thought of as the facilitator would only call back, and keep calling until he answered. If he refused to answer, there would be consequences.

  This isn’t hell, he thought, the accommodations are too nice, but it’s purgatory. And no prospect of retirement for a long time.

  He muted the TV and picked up the phone. He didn’t say hello. What he said was, “This isn’t fair. I just got in from Seattle two days ago. I’m still in recovery mode.”

  “Understood and terribly sorry, but this has come up and you’re the only one available.” Sorry came out thorry.

  The facilitator had the soothing, put-you-to-sleep voice of an FM disc jockey, spoiled only by an occasional light lisp. Dixon had never seen him, but imagined him as tall and slim, with blue eyes and an ageless, unlined face. In reality he was probably fat, bald, and swarthy, but Dixon felt confident his mental picture would never change, because he never expected to see the facilitator. He had known a number of turbulence experts over his years with the firm—if it was a firm—and none of them had ever seen the man. Certainly none of the experts who worked for him were unlined; even the ones in their twenties and thirties looked middle-aged. It wasn’t the job, where there were sometimes late hours but no heavy lifting. It was what made them capable of doing the job.

  “Tell me,” Dixon said.

  “Allied Airlines Flight 19. Nonstop Boston to Sarasota. Leaves at 8:10 tonight. You’ve just got time to make it.”

  “There’s nobody else?” Dixon realized he was nearly bleating. “I’m tired, man. Tired. That run from Seattle was a bitch.”

  “Your usual seat,” the facilitator said, pronouncing the last word theat. Then he hung up.

  Dixon looked at swordfish he no longer wanted. He looked at the Kate Winslet movie he would never finish, at least not in Boston. He thought—and not for the first time!—of just packing up and renting a car and driving north, first to New Hampshire, then to Maine, then across the border to Canada. But they would catch him. This he knew. And the rumors of what happened to experts who ran included electrocution, evisceration, even being boiled alive. Dixon did not believe these rumors…except he sort of did.

  He began to pack. There wasn’t much. Turbulence experts traveled light.

  2

  His ticket was waiting for him at the counter. As always, his assignment placed him in coach, just aft of the starboard wing, in the middle seat. How that particular one could always be available was another mystery, like who the facilitator was, where he was calling from, or what sort of an organization he worked for. Like the ticket, the seat was just always waiting for him.

  Dixon placed his bag in the overhead bin and looked at tonight’s fellow trave
lers: a businessman with red eyes and gin breath on the aisle, a middle-aged lady who looked like a librarian next to the window. The businessman grunted something unintelligible when Dixon sidled past him with a murmured apology. The guy was reading a paperback charmingly titled Don’t Let the Boss F**k With You. The elderly librarian type was looking out the window at the various pieces of equipment that were trundling back and forth, as if they were the most fascinating things she had ever seen. There was knitting in her lap. Looked to Dixon like a sweater.

  She turned, gave him a smile, and held out her hand. “Hello, I’m Mary Worth. Just like the comic strip chick.”

  Dixon didn’t know any comic strip chick named Mary Worth, but he shook her hand. “Craig Dixon. Nice to meet you.”

  The businessman grunted and turned a page in his book.

  “I’m so looking forward to this,” Mary Worth said. “I haven’t had a real vacation in twelve years. I’m sharing the rent of a little place on Siesta Key with a couple of chums.”

  “Chums,” the businessman grunted. The grunt seemed to be his default position.

  “Yes!” Mary Worth twinkled. “We have it for three weeks. We’ve never actually met, but they are true chums. We’re all widows. We met in a chat room on the Internet. It’s so wonderful, the Internet. There was nothing like it when I was young.”

  “Pedophiles think it’s wonderful, too,” said the businessman, and turned another page.

  Ms. Worth’s smile faltered, then came on strong. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Dixon. Are you traveling for business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” he said.

  The speakers went ding-dong. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Stuart speaking. You’ll see that we are pulling away from the gate and beginning our taxi to Runway 3, where we’re third in line for take-off. We estimate a two hour and forty-minute flight down to SRQ, which should put you in the land of palms and sandy beaches just before eleven o’clock. Skies are clear, and we’re anticipating a smooth ride all the way. Now I’d like you to fasten your seatbelts, put away any tray tables you may have lowered—”