Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales

by L. A. Lewis

  ‘Carr said he must have found his way back to his field, and landed there quite automatically. His next conscious recollection was of a leaning against a tree sobbing like a baby, while an alarmed mechanic offered him a cup of water.’

  Beckett came to an abrupt halt, but, seeing that the others were waiting for him to continue, added briefly. ‘That was all Cart told me I never saw him alive again.'

  'My God!’ whispered Mrs. Conyer. ‘What a ghastly idea!’ She stopped, looked helplessly at the others, and went on, ‘Forgive me, Mr. Beckett, but did - did your friend drink?’

  Beckett shook his head.

  ‘No more than I do or any of us here. Personally, I believe Carr’s account. You must please yourselves what construction you put on it.’

  He relapsed into thoughtful silence.

  ‘Why in God’s name did he go back to the Ridgeway yesterday?’ asked young Remington, obviously deeply impressed.

  Beckett shrugged.

  ‘Nobody could guess the active range of such a - manifestation,’ he replied. ‘Carr’s flight started in the opposite direction, and maybe the green thing found him and took him there. The passenger fell out, you know, nearly two miles away, and that hasn’t been explained. I think he jumped!'

  Jacobs had been staring moodily at the carpet during the whole of Beckett’s recital. Now he straightened up, and gave him a very curious glance.

  ‘Sorry,’ he began, ‘but this is right outside my experience or understanding. I see you’re sincere, Beckett, and I won’t be such a swine as to laugh, especially after Pitchmann’s behaviour. But no! Sorry, I can’t - '

  The harsh ‘burr’ of the telephone interrupted him. The barman picked up the receiver, and they heard him answering the call.

  ‘Yes. Speaking. What’s that? Whereabouts? Good Lord! Both of them? What’s that? A mile?’

  He turned from the instrument to Jacobs. ‘Ridge Village Police, sir,’ he announced. ‘Captain Pitchmann’s crashed.'

  Mrs. Conyer and Remington sprang spontaneously to their feet.

  ‘Where?’Jacobs demanded.

  ‘On the Ridgeway sir, close to Mr. Carr’s Avro.’

  ‘Are they - all right?’ Jacobs managed with an effort. The barman shook his head gravely.

  ‘No. Both killed. The Sergeant thinks the gale got them out of control. Mr. Blake was flung out a mile away.’

  Beckett crossed his legs, and knocked out his pipe on his boot-heel.

  ‘As you remarked just now, Jacobs,’ he put in quietly. ‘Queer things - Bumps.’

  The Iron Swine

  I DON’T KNOW just why it is that Beckett - the fellow who told us about the green ghosts of the air the day Pitchmann was killed - is always the nucleus of any debate in our little flying club when talk veers towards the supernatural. In any case, it’s a bit unusual to find the membership of such an institution taking the subject seriously. Most flying people are materialists, more or less, and apparently unimaginative, but Beckett is evidently keen on spooks, and, being a wartime pilot with plenty of seniority, doesn’t hesitate to take a chance on ridicule about his pet subject. He’s pretty hard boiled, and so receives little open contradiction from the most sceptical, whilst the majority of us find him well worth listening to, whatever our private views.

  The local vicar, an admirably broad-minded man, who was a Flying Corps padre in the year dot, often drops in for a drink and a chat, and it was on the occasion of one of his visits that the conversation turned upon the nautical superstition that ships have souls. The vicar was, perhaps surprisingly, a protagonist of this belief, and maintained that it was in no way at variance with the tenets of his Faith. He argued, I recall, that some part of the personalities of designer and workman might easily be imparted to a vessel under construction, though nobody present seemed able to produce any convincing evidence.

  It was here that Beckett chimed in, with his usual air of calm assurance, and supported the vicar with the affirmation that he knew at least one aeroplane possessed of a soul - and a damned malicious one, at that.

  ‘It is one of those foreign, all-metal jobs,’ he began, ‘built of ribbed duralumin, of course, for lightness, but it looked like a sheet of corrugated iron, flying around with a hunch-backed whale-like body stuck amidships. I flew the beastly thing a bit at one time, and my term of endearment for it was “The Iron Swine*. As far as I know, the designer only built one of them, and then went broke, because he couldn’t get the type taken up for production. By tile time he finished the yarn those of you who follow aviation history will know the kite I’m talking about - but “no names, no pack-drill”.

  ‘Handling the brute, even in fair weather, was like pushing a lump of pig-iron around the sky, and on a rough day it was an abortion. The most severely practical blokes who flew it hated the thing, and I personally sensed its sullen antagonism first time I had it aloft. On full engine it would sometimes fly quite well so far as normal banking turns went, but as soon as you throttled down for an approach, it began to buck. It had no gliding angle, as one understands the term on reasonable aircraft. Either it would stick its hog nose down and dive at the deck like a falling house, or, if you held it back anywhere near stalling speed, it began to flick and twitch against your control for all the world like a freshly caught fish. The only way to make sure of landing properly was to “rumble” in with a spot of engine, and. even then, it would either try to overshoot the aerodrome or drop out of your hands in a fast "pancake".

  ‘Well, that animated lump of metal is still on the list of registered aircraft, and it has belonged, to my knowledge, to at least five different private owners. It has killed all but one of them. The amazing thing is that it has done its killing without ever being seriously crashed. My belief is that it’s too blasted crafty. It hates pilots, but it doesn’t want to die itself!

  ‘Its first victim was a laddie with more money than brains, who bought it to show off to his friends. It’s a big beast, and will carry ten passengers comfortably.

  To avoid any chance of action for slander on the part of the designer - a man I should be psychologically interested to meet - I’ll name the owners fictitiously but alphabetically, calling the first one Arthur.

  ‘Well, Arthur, though young, was a post-war R.A.F. product, and quite a good pilot. He noticed the peculiarities of the “Iron Swine” as soon as he flew it - who wouldn’t? - and had the sense to treat it with respect. As a matter of fact, he put in quite a number of flying hours with it, mostly taking parties of his pals on trips to the Continent.

  ‘The “swine”, finding that it couldn’t disconcert him with its aerial antics, hit him on the head with its airscrew one day when he was “sucking in” prior to starting the engine and that was the end of Arthur. The Air Ministry held the usual enquiry, and found that the switch was definitely off at the time of the accident, and that there was no apparent defect in the ignition system. The “swine” had miraculously produced a spark out of thin air in just one of its cylinders, and this had sufficed

  ‘As a precautionary measure, the whole system was re-wired, and the machine was purchased from Arthur’s executors by owner number two, whom we’ll call Bill, and this is where most of you will identify the “iron swine”, because Bill fitted it up with special tanks to fly the Atlantic, and it got him across! The only snag was that he lost his bearings in fog, and finished up in the Swiss Alps, upside down in a snowdrift. The drift was a good twelve feet deep, and the “swine” was hardly damaged except for broken propeller and rudder; but it trapped Bill, and he was found a week later, starved and frozen in.’

  ‘Why; broke in Ralston - a very junior member ‘that must have been - ’ But Beckett stopped him there.

  ‘ “No names, no pack drill”; he reminded him gently, and proceeded with the story.

  ‘Bill’s father,’ he continued, ‘sold it to a man who shall be named Charlie, and it was during his turn of ownership that I had to fly it. He put it into commission, you see, for taxi-work,
and asked me to run it on a profit-sharing basis, as I had a ‘B’ licence, and he hadn’t. I’d never been up in it before, and, for the first few landings, it had me guessing. However, I soon got it more or less “buttoned up”, and did quite an amount of charter work with it, over a period of six months.

  I always treated it, though, with the greatest - er, well, not respect - who could respect a mechanical pig? - but caution and determination. Its previous history had made me think, and the very feel of it, as soon as I got into the cockpit, told me as plainly as the voice of Con-science it was a killer. At the same time I got a distinct impression that it had no suicidal tendencies, and so realised that I was fairly safe as far as actual crashes were concerned, provided I maintained my attitude of extreme watchfulness. One measure which I always took was to strap myself in - a thing I don’t usually trouble about, except for aerobatics.

  ‘Now, I suppose most of you blokes will admit that I’ve flown years enough to know something about it, and also that my sensitive imagination has not yet destroyed my flying nerve. If you don't. don’t give two hoots, but an appreciation of the point will assist belief in what I’m going to tell you next.

  ‘No doubt most of you who’ve done much flying have had the “jumpy" hours after a forced landing when you keep on thinking the engine has developed a “new noise". I’ve had the feeling myself, arc learned to control it, but, as surely as I’m sitting here, the “iron swine” did make noises at me!

  This happened mainly when I was flying back “light" after a taxi job, and there were no passengers to hear. If I opened the engine flat out, it bellowed with rage - a sort of superimposed bellow, entirely distinct from the normal sequence of mechanical sounds. When I throttled back a bit. the whole aircraft snarled at me, and, at really low “revs” and cruising speed it would squeal like the dirty sow that it is.

  ‘The outfit, for the benefit of any of you who have not got it taped, is a low-wing monoplane with a humped back, and the pilot’s accommodation consists of a double cockpit fitted out with side-by-side dual control, so that two pilots can collaborate on a flight, either one taking over on a course if the other wishes to retire into the passenger saloon for a rest. This saloon is. of course, completely enclosed and fitted with windows to give its occupants a view of the underlying scenery; but the pilot’s compartment - situated forward, and immediately behind the engine - is only half canopied, having a bridge-piece in the centre, and two sizeable apertures above, through which one can step from the wing into either port or starboard seat. Large as these openings are. the sprawling proportions of the machine dwarf them when viewed from a distance, and they take on the appearance of little, swinish, vindictive eyes peering cunningly over a blunt, gross snout. Sometimes when I had the “iron swine” parked at its base, at one of the London airports, I would go over to the hangars at dusk, and deliberately look it over as it stood in semi-obscurity, sullenly crouching its deformed, misbegotten shape in a dusky comer. It couldn’t work miracles, much as it may have wished, but, without the bestial noises it made in flight, the malignant personality of the thing still cloaked it, and I could sense its aura of cold, relentless, controlled fury as it tried to weigh me up and discover a means whereby, despite my caution, it could kill.

  ‘You fellows may think I’m shooting one hell of a line about a perfectly everyday mechanical contrivance which, ably controlled, could be made to show the precise, dynamic performance worked out on paper by its designer but I’m telling you that your guess is a joke. That flying monstrosity has the heart of a beast, and the mark of the beast stands out like a red scar in every line of its structure. If I were not a compassionate man, I’d like to pick on every pilot who privately laughs at my opinion and make him do ten hours solo on the hellion. It wouldn’t bump him off by spinning into the deck. Good Lord, no! It’s much too anxious to keep the inspired individuality with which its designer or craftsman has endowed it.

  ‘Well, to get back to the history of this alleged aeroplane, there came a day when there were no contracts demanding immediate attention, and Charlie’s garage business was slack. He came down to my hang-out, and suggested taking up the “iron swine” for a pleasure cruise to keep his hand in at flying. He had never taken the thing up solo, and didn’t intend to on this occasion, but he’d flown it now and then with me in the spare cockpit, and had its idiosyncracies more or less “taped”.

  ‘The perishing hulk was enough trouble to me on commercial work, without my wishing to fly it for fun, but, after all, he was the owner, and for various obvious reasons I could hardly argue the point.

  ‘As I’ve already told you, I’d contracted the habit of strapping myself well and truly into the seat with my shoulder harness - and on that day I’m damn glad I did, for it was as “bumpy” as sin. Charlie, on the contrary, thought himself a bit above that kind of precaution. He had sense enough to realise that the “swine” was not a stuntable aircraft, but considered that, for straight flying, harnessing was a bit “old maidish”.

  ‘I let him please himself, probably against my better judgment, and proceeded to take off.

  ‘Our - or rather Charlie’s - idea was to fly down to Shoreham, do a matinee or anything else complying with our inclinations at Brighton, and trickle quietly back to Town towards sunset. He picked a “wizard” day for the trip - fifty mile an hour head-wind, and occasional gusts enough to lift you off the deck after you’d landed. I climbed up to a couple of thousand before handing over to C. I'm not so fond of inexperienced pilots pushing me about the firmament at no feet in that class of weather. Then I let him take over, and all went well till we got somewhere near Leatherhead, except for being thrown all over the sky by eddies and things several times per minute.

  ‘In the mid-Surrey district the bumps became a thousand times worse - probably on account of the hills - and all of a sudden we hit the worst “sinker" I've ever struck. The “swine" fell out of Charlie's hands like a wagon-load of rubble, and lost about four hundred feet in the whisker of a second. Revelling as it did in that sort of emergency, it performed a couple of its own particular twitches, nearly cracking my harness, and shot poor old Charlie slap through the top of the cockpit. I didn’t even see him go, having, as you can imagine, fastened on to the controls pretty swiftly. I'd heard the old tall story about an observer falling out of his ’plane during the War and being caught by his pilot on a power dive, but had as little belief in the yarn as I have now. Nevertheless, I thought I’d have a crack at it, and forced the “swine" into a vertical left-hand turn, with the nose well down. I caught another peach of a bump on the way round, and the “swine" put up another wriggle which damn near had me on my back, but I never even glimpsed Charlie's body as he dropped. He'd no 'chute, of course, and I knew he was a “goner", but as there was no field within miles where I could have got down without crashing I headed back for London, where they’d already got telephonic news of the fatality.

  ‘The “iron swine”, having temporarily satisfied its blood lust, behaved wonderfully well for a change, and even seemed to carve up the air pockets disdainfully, on a dead even keel. It snarled at me a bit en route, but the noise struck me as representing the triumphant, though defensive articulation of a jungle animal poised over its “kill”. It lacked the customary deadly antagonism.

  ‘Charlie was married, and his wife had the settling up of his estate. One is glad to reflect that he left her well provided for. She hated all aircraft, and attended to the sale and disposal of his other assets before worrying about his cabin monoplane. Incidentally, I went on flying it for hire for some months, and handing her the profits, which were not inconsiderable. The thing was advertised for sale in the various aeronautical journals, but nobody seemed to want it, even at scrap price. It had gained a reputation for being “unlucky”.

  ‘The damn thing had several goes at me in the interim. Once it tried the original dodge of swiping me with its airscrew when the switch was off, once it jumped the chocks and made straight for
me when a ground engineer was running up the engine, and on a third occasion it attempted to throw me out in mid-air, as it had with Charlie. Maybe it thought it could land itself without a pilot. I’d give it credit for even that ingenuity. In each case, fortunately, I was ready, and finally I got the credit of being the only pilot to fly a hundred hours on it without mishap.

  ‘This fact, I suppose, pushed its selling-price up a hit, and it was at last bought by a fourth person who, for narrative purposes, shall bear the name Derek. He got it remarkably cheaply, and was highly delighted with his bargain.

  'He was a fellow who’d done five years in the Service and a fairish bit of civil flying too, but he'd heard of the "iron swine’s” freakishness, and got me to give him a landing or two before he took it up alone. I put him wise to its principal snags with regard to approaches and landings, and he seemed to get the hang of it astonishingly quickly. After twenty minutes or so he decided to go up solo for about an hour, and, on landing, confounded me by saying he liked the kite. Every other pilot I know who's flown it loathes the sight of the thing.