The Ghosts of Hexley Airport

by Cross, Amy

  Opening her mouth, she was about to call out when she suddenly realized that she should perhaps stay quiet for a moment and come up with a better plan.

  Twisting her wrists, she tried to slip them free, and when that didn't work she began to look along the line of the pipes, searching for some other way to get loose. Finally, turning and pressing her boots against the wall, she started pulling as hard as she could manage, only to let out a grunt of pain as she felt the ropes tightening around her wrists. She didn't let that stop her, however, and instead she pulled and pulled until her boots slipped.

  “That won't do any good,” a voice said calmly.

  Startled, she turned and saw that David had already returned from whatever he'd been doing in the main part of the hangar. He'd been gone a few minutes, since tying her up, and he was still holding the hunting knife he'd earlier pressed against her throat.

  “Help!” she screamed, looking toward the door. “Somebody help me! I'm in here!”

  “I'll help you!” David stammered, stepping toward her before suddenly stopping, his eyes filled with confusion. A moment later, a flicker of pain crossed his face. “No, I can't help you,” he continued, clearly confused by some sudden realization. “I can't, can I? Even if that's what she'd want, I can't assume...” He paused, as if momentarily torn between two conflicting sets of desires that were trying to tear him in opposite directions. Finally, he turned to Casey again. “You still don't get it, do you?”

  “Help! Help me!”

  “It's amazing what the human mind can ignore,” he continued. “Something can be right in front of you, as plain as the nose on your face, and still you won't or you can't see that it's true!”

  “Help me!”

  “There are so many ghosts here at Hexley Airport,” David muttered, as if he didn't care that she was crying out, as if it didn't even matter. “Then again, there are a lot of ghosts in the town, too. There are ghosts in my house. I had two daughters. One, Alice -”

  “Help!” Casey screamed, until she could taste blood at the back of her throat. “Somebody get me out of here!”

  “Alice died eleven years ago,” he continued. “Leukemia. It was the cruelest thing I've ever seen in my life. An innocent little girl, dying in agony just because of some genetic error. I started drinking so much after that. Eventually my wife Jennifer left me. Well, she left several times, but she always came back until...”

  His voice trailed off for a moment. Closing his eyes for a moment, he let his lips tremble slightly before letting his eyes slip open again.

  “She and my other daughter, Tammy, were on the plane when it went down. The funny thing is, Jennifer and Alice have both come back to me in the house. Not Tammy, though. I think her ghost is here somewhere, at the airport. Funny how that works out, isn't it? Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange. You'd think she'd come to the house, but no. She haunts the airport. I've tried calling out to her, I've tried begging her to come to me, but she won't. Or she can't. I've called her name so many times, I can still hear my own voice crying out, even when I'm trying to sleep.”

  “What are you talking about?” Casey sobbed, still trying to get free. “Why are you doing this?”

  “It's strange when ghosts don't realize they're ghosts,” he continued, with a faint smile. “Like that kid I saw in the forest. Or that Tom guy you were working with... He genuinely had no idea, huh? He was cracking up, but he still couldn't face the truth. A ghost, scared of other ghosts. I've got to admit, the whole thing is pretty bizarre.”

  “Tom's not a ghost,” she stammered. “You're insane!”

  “Thomas Edward Watson died on flight DSE9191,” David replied calmly.

  Casey shook her head, as tears streamed down her face.

  “You don't believe me? I can prove it.” Getting to his feet, David lifted his shirt over his head, revealing the tattoo that covered his back. “It's a copy of that awful monument from the forest,” he explained. “I destroyed the monument earlier. I took a sledgehammer to it. I couldn't stand it being there a moment longer, not after I thought I saw Tammy there. But look, near the bottom of the fourth column, you can see Tom's name.”

  “Why have you got that?” Casey sobbed. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Do you see any other interesting names on there?” he asked, stepping back toward her so she could see more clearly. “They're in alphabetical order. Look closer, Casey. All the passengers are on there, and all the crew. And also the ground staff who died that day, like Derek Muir. And two security guards who were the first on the scene after the plane came down, and who were killed by a falling tree. One of them was named Thomas Edward Watson...”

  “No,” Casey whimpered, squeezing her eyes tight shut.

  “And the other was named Casey Monroe. Do you remember now? Do you remember dying ten years ago?”

  “Stop it!” she hissed, keeping her eyes shut even though they were starting to hurt

  “Some of the ghosts know they're ghosts,” he continued, “but some are trapped, repeating aspects of their old lives over and over. That's what you and Tom have been doing, isn't it? Drifting, lost, knowing that something's wrong but never quite managing to put your finger on what or -”

  “Stop!” she screamed, opening her eyes and glaring up at him. “You're a liar!”

  Chuckling, he turned to look at her.

  “For ten years,” he explained, “I've lived with the pain of knowing I caused my wife and daughter to be on that plane. If I hadn't become such a complete mess, if I hadn't become a drunk, they'd never have left me. They'd still be here today. I managed to hold myself together, just about. I carried on working at the perfume shop in the departure hall. I pretended to live a normal life, at least by day. But by night, the nightmares came. Terrible nightmares, Casey, filled with screams and flames. I haven't been able to keep from imagining, over and over, what it was like for Jennifer and Tammy as they died. And do you know why they died? It was all because of a man named Ted Halloran.”

  Checking his watch, he paused for a moment before stepping around to Casey's other side.

  “People are going to show up for work soon,” he continued. “The airport's going to open and there'll be people everywhere. Thousands of people. I can leave the cabinet locked, and I can put a note in the security office, and I can keep people from figuring this out for another couple of hours. I have to take my chance today. I can't risk waiting for the next snowstorm. This is the worst the weather has been since the night of the original crash.”

  He took a deep breath, as if he was relieved, and then he stepped closer to Casey while the knife still dangling from his hand. After a moment, he crouched in front of her, staring deep into her eyes.

  “Ted Halloran was an engineer here at Hexley Airport,” he explained. “One day, he accidentally connected the wrong pipes for a few minutes. Unfortunately, that was all it took for the wrong liquids to be pumped through the deicing machines. Instead of having deicing fluid sprayed over its wings, flight DSE9191 was covered in a coolant that accelerated the freezing process. Ted didn't realize the enormity of his mistake until it was too late, until the plane had already crashed shortly after takeoff.”

  Still trying to get free from the ropes, Casey let out a faint, muffled whimper as tears streamed down her face.

  “Ted couldn't bear to admit that he was responsible for those two hundred and eighteen deaths,” Tom added. “He couldn't stand the shame. So he simply quit his job and began drinking himself to death. He only ever told one person the truth, and that was me, on his deathbed. At first I was angry. I was furious that a simple mistake killed my wife and daughter. But once the shock and grief had passed, I began to feel a kind of fascination. A simple little error, undetected by the accident investigators, had killed all those people, and Ted had been able to get away with it. I couldn't help imagining what it would feel like if I arranged for the same thing to one day happen again.”

  Casey tried to turn away from him, but stil
l the ropes were too tight.

  “You've seen the storm out there,” David pointed out. “I've set a timer on a valve at the deicing pad. It's hidden, it won't be detected until after the accident. The exact same failure that brought down flight DSE9191 ten years ago, is now going to bring down another flight. Isn't that kind of poetic? And before you tell me I can't do it, that I'll never get away with it, let me show you something.”

  Reaching into his pocket, he took out a piece of paper with some printed details.

  “I'm going to be on that plane,” he continued with a grin. “I'm finally going to know what it was like for Jennifer and Tammy in their final moments. That's all I want. To feel what they felt, to feel that rush as the plane goes down. I'm even going to be in the exact same seat as Tammy. And maybe this way, I'll get to join them just a little faster. I'll die the same way they died. And the other people on the plane? I'm afraid theirs will just be the necessary screams.”

  He hesitated, with a hint of fear in his eyes, before slipping the paper away and then staring at Casey for a moment.

  “I'm not a bad person,” he told her. “It's just, this is my only chance to ever know what it was like for them. I have to take that. You'll understand eventually. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get ready.”

  With that, he got to his feet and headed to the door.

  “Stop!” Casey screamed. “You can't do this! Untie me!”

  “If only you understood what a stupid thing that was to ask,” he replied, glancing back at her. “Maybe it's impossible. Maybe you can't ever accept that you're dead. Either way, it doesn't really matter. Scream all you want. You're a ghost. Who do you think is going to hear you?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  As the first rays of morning sun began to light the sky behind the trees, people started arriving at Hexley Airport. Just a small trickle at first, as tired-looking workers showed up to get everything running, but then the passengers began to appear, streaming from buses and cars, hurrying into the terminal building. By the time the sky had fully brightened, the airport had transformed and come to life, filled with a vast, bustling throng of several thousand people.

  And as the first planes began to get clearance for take-off, they were sent first to the deicing pad, where men on cranes spread deicing fluids over their wings. Nearby, in one of the maintenance huts, nobody had noticed a small device attached to one of the pipes, with a timer counting down to the moment when a certain plane's call-sign would trigger a valve that would switch the pipes to a separate reservoir. There had been a chance that the deicing supervisor might have spotted the valve when he arrived in the morning, but that opportunity had been and gone, and now everything was set as thicker fog began to creep across the airport.

  In the main hangar, meanwhile, nobody could hear the scream that was coming from the office. After all, the living never heard the dead at Hexley Airport, not unless they already knew they should be listening. And as Casey continued to call out, the day crew simply got on with their work.

  ***

  Humming to himself as he stood in the men's bathroom, David checked his reflection in the mirror and took a moment to adjust his tie. His old clothes lay in a crumpled heap in a nearby bin, and he'd almost finished changing into the jacket and tie he always wore when traveling. And still he hummed happily as he got ready.

  He was humming one of the lullabies he'd hummed to Tammy when she was a little girl.

  In his mind's eye, he could see her face, but not her face as it had been in the past. He was seeing her face as it would be when he saw her again. For years now, he'd felt certain that Tammy was waiting for him, just on the other side of some gate or doorway. There had been so many moments when he'd come close to taking the plunge, when he'd felt ready to end his life so that he could go and join her. He'd always held back, though. He'd always told himself that he had to first experience what they'd experienced, and somewhere in the back of his thoughts he'd begun to formulate a plan.

  ***

  Six years ago

  “You don't understand,” Ted sobbed, retching slightly as he leaned against the wall in the alley behind the pub. Specks of vomit were stuck to his chin, and he was still clutching the pint of vodka he'd smuggled out at closing time. “I hear them, David. I hear them screaming every time I close my eyes.”

  “You've got to get over this,” David told him, placing a hand on the older man's shoulder. “It's eating away at you.”

  “It was my fault,” Ted whispered, looking up at the moon for a moment. “I killed them.”

  “Ted -”

  “I killed them!” he said again, with much more venom this time, as he turned and stared at David. “The crash was my fault!”

  David shook his head. “There's going to be another investigation. They're going to find out what really happened, but no one person could have caused the plane to come down.”

  “I mixed up the deicing fluids! I thought I'd caught it in time, I didn't even realize the feed had been live at the time! It was only after the plane came down that I realized...” He paused for a moment, before setting his pint glass on a nearby bin and then holding his trembling hands up for David to see. “These hands! These are the hands that turned the valve that caused the crash! It was an accident, but it was my fault! I can't tell anyone, not ever!”

  “That's not possible,” David told him, with a hint of caution in his voice now. “There are safeguards, there are checks to make sure nothing like that can happen.”

  “There are plenty of safeguards, alright,” Ted replied, “but when they're all supposed to be carried out by the same person...”

  His voice trailed off for a moment, and then he grabbed the pint glass, downing the rest of the vodka in one go before turning and letting out a series of hacking, spluttering coughs that left him doubled-over and leaning against the bin.

  “It was all my fault,” he groaned after a moment, taking a step forward before dropping to his knees. “I was lazy. I was complacent. I made a mistake, and I don't even have the balls to own up to it. I kept waiting for them to find out, but they never did. I thought they'd figure it out eventually, but here were are four years later and they're still just saying the crash was caused by some kind of mechanical failure. I don't think they're ever going to realize it was my fault, and I can't bring myself to tell them. What am I supposed to do, David? How can I live with this?”

  Staring at him, David seemed struck dumb by the news, as if he couldn't quite take in everything he was hearing.

  “You lost Jenny, didn't you?” Ted continued, turning to him with tears in his eyes. “And little Tammy. All those people died, simply because I didn't check which pipe I'd connected, and because after I realized my mistake, I assumed I'd caught it in time. How can I live, knowing that all those people died because of me? How many were there again? Two hundred and ten? I killed two hundred and ten people!”

  Sobbing, he slumped down against the ground.

  “Two hundred and eighteen,” David said calmly. “Not two hundred and ten. Two hundred and eighteen. How can you not even...”

  His voice trailed off for a moment.

  “I can't stop thinking about them!” Ted whimpered, holding his hands over his face as if he was trying to block the world out. “I don't want Debbie and Sharon to know that it was my fault! They'd hate me! Everyone'd hate me! I can't live like this, David! I can't live with their screams in my head!”

  David opened his mouth to reply, before hesitating for a few seconds and then looking toward the end of the alley. In the distance, the lights of a late-night off-license could just about be made out burning through the night air.

  “Wait here,” he said finally, before stepping over Ted's sobbing body and making his way toward the lights.

  A few minutes later he was back, holding two heavy plastic bags filled with bottles. Setting them on the ground, he crouched next to Ted and took one of the bottles out. He examined the label for a moment, before unscrewing th
e lid and taking a sniff.

  “Vodka,” he explained, handing the bottle to Ted.

  Immediately starting to drink, Ted clutched the bottle with trembling hands. David simply watched with a calm, blank expression, before finally getting to his feet.

  Lowering the bottle for a moment, Ted let out a gasp. He'd already drunk a third of the vodka, and two more bottles were sitting in the bags next to him, along with two bottles of whiskey and some gin. His yellowing eyes stared at the opposite wall and his lips quivered slightly, while deep, sickly gurgles filled his belly.

  “I have to go home now,” David said calmly. “Will you be alright here?”

  “I killed them,” Ted whispered, before taking another swig of vodka.

  “You've been looking a little sick lately,” David told him. “A little yellowy. A few people have commented on it. You really should start taking better care of yourself.”

  Without replying, Ted took yet another long swig of vodka, and now he was halfway through the bottle after just a couple of minutes.

  “Don't drink too much of what's in those bags,” David continued. “I think you're already very close to getting ill. If you drank the rest of that bottle, and then half of the next, you might get alcohol poisoning. And that color in your eyes, Ted, suggests to me that your liver's already beginning to fail. So all things considered, you really mustn't drink too much.”

  With his boot, he nudged the bags closer to Ted, before taking a step back.

  “I need to stop the screams in my head,” Ted slurred, his head swaying a little now as he stared down into the bottle. “I need to... I need to make them go away, I need... I've never stopped hearing them since it happened...”

  “I'll give you a call in a day or two,” David replied, “to see how you're doing. Just promise me, Ted, that you won't drink all that vodka. I'm sure it'd make the screams go away, but -”