Twenty minutes later, Wilson reached down slowly and depressed the button, sitting up with the chair, his face a mask of vanquished acceptance. Why fight it? he thought. It was obvious he was going to stay awake. So that was that.
He had finished half of the crossword puzzle before he let the paper drop to his lap. His eyes were too tired. Sitting up, he rotated his shoulders, stretching the muscles of his back. Now what? he thought. He didn’t want to read, he couldn’t sleep. And there were still—he checked his watch—seven to eight hours left before Los Angeles was reached. How was he to spend them? He looked along the cabin and saw that, except for a single passenger in the forward compartment, everyone was asleep.
A sudden, overwhelming fury filled him and he wanted to scream, to throw something, to hit somebody. Teeth jammed together so rabidly it hurt his jaws, Wilson shoved aside the curtains with a spastic hand and stared out murderously through the window.
Outside, he saw the wing lights blinking off and on, the lurid flashes of exhaust from the engine cowlings. Here he was, he thought; twenty-thousand feet above the earth, trapped in a howling shell of death, moving through polar night toward—
Wilson twitched as lightning bleached the sky, washing its false daylight across the wing. He swallowed. Was there going to be a storm? The thought of rain and heavy winds, of the plane a chip in the sea of sky was not a pleasant one. Wilson was a bad flyer. Excess motion always made him ill. Maybe he should have taken another few Dramamines to be on the safe side. And, naturally, his seat was next to the emergency door. He thought about it opening accidentally; about himself sucked from the plane, falling, screaming.
Wilson blinked and shook his head. There was a faint tingling at the back of his neck as he pressed close to the window and stared out. He sat there motionless, squinting. He could have sworn—
Suddenly, his stomach muscles jerked in violently and he felt his eyes strain forward. There was something crawling on the wing.
Wilson felt a sudden, nauseous tremor in his stomach. Dear God, had some dog or cat crawled onto the plane before takeoff and, in some way managed to hold on? It was a sickening thought. The poor animal would be deranged with terror. Yet, how, on the smooth, wind-blasted surface, could it possibly discover gripping places? Surely that was impossible. Perhaps, after all, it was only a bird or—
The lightning flared and Wilson saw that it was a man.
He couldn’t move. Stupefied, he watched the black form crawling down the wing. Impossible. Somewhere, cased in layers of shock, a voice declared itself but Wilson did not hear. He was conscious of nothing but the titanic, almost muscle-tearing leap of his heart—and of the man outside.
Suddenly, like ice-filled water thrown across him, there was a reaction; his mind sprang for the shelter of explanation. A mechanic had, through some incredible oversight, been taken up with the ship and had managed to cling to it even though the wind had torn his clothes away, even though the air was thin and close to freezing.
Wilson gave himself no time for refutation. Jarring to his feet, he shouted: “Stewardess! Stewardess!” his voice a hollow, ringing sound in the cabin. He pushed the button for her with a jabbing finger.
“Stewardess!”
She came running down the aisle, her face tightened with alarm. When she saw the look on his face, she stiffened in her tracks.
“There’s a man out there! A man!” cried Wilson.
“What?” Skin constricted on her cheeks, around her eyes.
“Look, look!” Hand shaking, Wilson dropped back into his seat and pointed out the window. “He’s crawling on the—”
The words ended with a choking rattle in his throat. There was nothing on the wing.
Wilson sat there trembling. For a while, before he turned back, he looked at the reflection of the stewardess on the window. There was a blank expression on her face.
At last, he turned and looked up at her. He saw her red lips part as though she meant to speak but she said nothing, only placing the lips together again and swallowing. An attempted smile distended briefly at her features.
“I’m sorry,” Wilson said. “It must have been a—”
He stopped as though the sentence were completed. Across the aisle a teenage girl was gaping at him with sleepy curiosity.
The stewardess cleared her throat. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“A glass of water,” Wilson said.
The stewardess turned and moved back up the aisle.
Wilson sucked in a long breath of air and turned away from the young girl’s scrutiny. He felt the same. That was the thing that shocked him most. Where were the visions, the cries, the pummeling of fists on temples, the tearing out of hair?
Abruptly he closed his eyes. There had been a man, he thought. There had, actually, been a man. That’s why he felt the same. And yet, there couldn’t have been. He knew that clearly.
Wilson sat with his eyes closed, wondering what Jacqueline would be doing now if she were in the seat beside him. Would she be silent, shocked beyond speaking? Or would she, in the more accepted manner, be fluttering around him, smiling, chattering, pretending that she hadn’t seen? What would his sons think? Wilson felt a dry sob threatening in his chest. Oh, God—
Behind him, as he sat with the untouched cup of water in his hand, he heard the muted voices of the stewardess and one of the passengers. Wilson tightened with resentment. Abruptly, he reached down and, careful not to spill the water, pulled out the overnight bag. Unzipping it, he removed the box of sleeping capsules and washed two of them down. Crumpling the empty cup, he pushed it into the seat-pocket in front of him, then, not looking, slid the curtains shut. There—it was ended. One hallucination didn’t make insanity.
Wilson turned onto his right side and tried to set himself against the fitful motion of the ship. He had to forget about this, that was the most important thing. He mustn’t dwell on it. Unexpectedly, he found a wry smile forming on his lips. Well, by God, no one could accuse him of mundane hallucinations anyway. When he went at it, he did a royal job. A naked man crawling down a DC-7’s wing at twenty-thousand feet—there was a chimera worthy of the noblest lunatic.
The humor faded quickly. Wilson felt chilled. It had been so clear, so vivid. How could the eyes see such a thing when it did not exist? How could what was in his mind make the physical act of seeing work to its purpose so completely? He hadn’t been groggy, in a daze—nor had it been a shapeless, gauzy vision. It had been sharply three-dimensional, fully a part of the things he saw which he knew were real. That was the frightening part of it. It had not been dreamlike in the least. He had looked at the wing and—
Impulsively, Wilson drew aside the curtain.
He did not know, immediately, if he would survive. It seemed as if all the contents of his chest and stomach were bloating horribly, the excess pushing up into his throat and head, choking away breath, pressing out his eyes. Imprisoned in this swollen mass, his heart pulsed strickenly, threatening to burst its case as Wilson sat, paralyzed.
Only inches away, separated from him by the thickness of a piece of glass, the man was staring at him.
It was a hideously malignant face, a face not human. Its skin was grimy, of a wide-pored coarseness; its nose a squat, discolored lump; its lips misshapen, cracked, forced apart by teeth of a grotesque size and crookedness; its eyes recessed and small—unblinking. All framed by shaggy, tangled hair which sprouted, too in furry tufts from the man’s ears and nose, in birdlike down across his cheeks.
Wilson sat riven to his chair, incapable of response. Time stopped and lost its meaning. Function and analysis ceased. All were frozen in an ice of shock. Only the beat of heart went on—alone, a frantic leaping in the darkness. Wilson could not so much as blink. Dull-eyed, breathless, he returned the creature’s vacant stare.
Abruptly then, he closed his eyes and his mind, rid of the si
ght, broke free. It isn’t there, he thought. He pressed his teeth together, breath quavering in his nostrils. It isn’t there, it simply is not there.
Clutching at the armrests with pale-knuckled fingers, Wilson braced himself. There is no man out there, he told himself. It was impossible that there should be a man out there crouching on the wing looking at him.
He opened his eyes—
—to shrink against the seat back with a gagging inhalation. Not only was the man still there but he was grinning. Wilson turned his fingers in and dug the nails into his palms until pain flared. He kept it there until there was no doubt in his mind that he was fully conscious.
Then, slowly, arm quivering and numb, Wilson reached up for the button which would summon the stewardess. He would not make the same mistake again—cry out, leap to his feet, alarm the creature into flight. He kept reaching upward, a tremor of aghast excitement in his muscles now because the man was watching him, the small eyes shifting with the movement of his arm.
He pressed the button carefully once, twice. Now come, he thought. Come with your objective eyes and see what I see—but hurry.
In the rear of the cabin, he heard a curtain being drawn aside and, suddenly, his body stiffened. The man had turned his caliban head to look in that direction. Paralyzed, Wilson stared at him. Hurry, he thought. For God’s sake, hurry!
It was over in a second. The man’s eyes shifted back to Wilson, across his lips a smile of monstrous cunning. Then with a leap, he was gone.
“Yes, sir?”
For a moment, Wilson suffered the fullest anguish of madness. His gaze kept jumping from the spot where the man had stood to the stewardess’s questioning face, then back again. Back to the stewardess, to the wing, to the stewardess, his breath caught, his eyes stark with dismay.
“What is it?” asked the stewardess.
It was the look on her face that did it. Wilson closed a vise on his emotions. She couldn’t possibly believe him. He realized it in an instant.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” he faltered. He swallowed so dryly that it made a clicking noise in his throat. “It’s nothing. I—apologize.”
The stewardess obviously didn’t know what to say. She kept leaning against the erratic yawing of the ship, one hand holding on to the back of the seat beside Wilson’s, the other stirring limply along the seam of her skirt. Her lips were parted slightly as if she meant to speak but could not find the words.
“Well,” she said finally and cleared her throat, “if you—need anything.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you. Are we—going into a storm?”
The stewardess smiled hastily. “Just a small one,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”
Wilson nodded with little twitching movements. Then, as the stewardess turned away, breathed in suddenly, his nostrils flaring. He felt certain that she already thought him mad but didn’t know what to do about it because, in her course of training, there had been no instruction on the handling of passengers who thought they saw small men crouching on the wing.
Thought?
Wilson turned his head abruptly and looked outside. He stared at the dark rise of the wing, the spouting flare of the exhausts, the blinking lights. He’d seen the man—to that he’d swear. How could he be completely aware of everything around him—be, in all ways, sane and still imagine such a thing? Was it logical that the mind, in giving way, should, instead of distorting all reality, insert, within the still intact arrangement of details, one extraneous sight?
No, not logical at all.
Suddenly, Wilson thought about war, about the newspaper stories which recounted the alleged existence of creatures in the sky who plagued the Allied pilots in their duties. They called them gremlins, he remembered. Were there, actually, such beings? Did they, truly, exist up here, never falling, riding on the wind, apparently of bulk and weight, yet impervious to gravity?
He was thinking that when the man appeared again.
One second the wing was empty. The next, with an arcing descent, the man came jumping down to it. There seemed no impact. He landed almost fragilely, short, hairy arms outstretched as if for balance. Wilson tensed. Yes, there was knowledge in his look. The man—was he to think of it as a man?—somehow understood that he had tricked Wilson into calling the stewardess in vain. Wilson felt himself tremble with alarm. How could he prove the man’s existence to others? He looked around desperately. That girl across the aisle. If he spoke to her softly, woke her up, would she be able to—
No, the man would jump away before she could see. Probably to the top of the fuselage where no one could see him, not even the pilots in their cockpit. Wilson felt a sudden burst of self-condemnation that he hadn’t gotten that camera Walter had asked for. Dear Lord, he thought, to be able to take a picture of the man.
He leaned in close to the window. What was the man doing?
Abruptly, darkness seemed to leap away as the wing was chalked with lightning and Wilson saw. Like an inquisitive child, the man was squatted on the hitching wing edge, stretching out his right hand toward one of the whirling propellers.
As Wilson watched, fascinatedly appalled, the man’s hand drew closer and closer to the blurring gyre until, suddenly, it jerked away and the man’s lips twitched back in a soundless cry. He’s lost a finger! Wilson thought, sickened. But, immediately, the man reached forward again, gnarled finger extended, the picture of some monstrous infant trying to capture the spin of a fan blade.
If it had not been so hideously out of place it would have been amusing for, objectively seen, the man, at that moment, was a comic sight—a fairy tale troll somehow come to life, wind whipping at the hair across his head and body, all of his attention centered on the turn of the propeller. How could this be madness? Wilson suddenly thought. What self-revelation could this farcical little horror possibly bestow on him?
Again and again, as Wilson watched, the man reached forward. Again and again jerked back his fingers, sometimes, actually, putting them in his mouth as if to cool them. And, always, apparently checking, he kept glancing back across at his shoulder looking at Wilson. He knows, thought Wilson. Knows that this is a game between us. If I am able to get someone else to see him, then he loses. If I am the only witness, then he wins. The sense of faint amusement was gone now. Wilson clenched his teeth. Why in hell didn’t the pilots see!
Now the man, no longer interested in the propeller, was settling himself across the engine cowling like a man astride a bucking horse. Wilson stared at him. Abruptly a shudder plaited down his back. The little man was picking at the plates that sheathed the engine, trying to get his nails beneath them.
Impulsively, Wilson reached up and pushed the button for the stewardess. In the rear of the cabin, he heard her coming and, for a second, thought he’d fooled the man, who seemed absorbed with his efforts. At the last moment, however, just before the stewardess arrived, the man glanced over at Wilson. Then, like a marionette jerked upward from its stage by wires, he was flying up into the air.
“Yes?” She looked at him apprehensively.
“Will you—sit down, please?” he asked.
She hesitated. “Well, I—”
“Please.”
She sat down gingerly on the seat beside his.
“What is it, Mr. Wilson?” she asked.
He braced himself.
“That man is still outside,” he said.
The stewardess stared at him.
“The reason I’m telling you this,” Wilson hurried on, “is that he’s starting to tamper with one of the engines.”
She turned her eyes instinctively toward the window.
“No, no, don’t look,” he told her. “He isn’t there now.” He cleared his throat viscidly. “He—jumps away whenever you come here.”
A sudden nausea gripped him as he realized what she must be thinking. As he realized what he, himself, wo
uld think if someone told him such a story. A wave of dizziness seemed to pass across him and he thought—I am going mad!
“The point is this,” he said, fighting off the thought. “If I’m not imagining this thing, the ship is in danger.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “You think I’ve lost my mind.”
“Of course not,” she said.
“All I ask is this,” he said, struggling against the rise of anger. “Tell the pilots what I’ve said. Ask them to keep an eye on the wings. If they see nothing—all right. But if they do—”
The stewardess sat there quietly, looking at him. Wilson’s hands curled into fists that trembled in his lap.
“Well?” he asked.
She pushed to her feet. “I’ll tell them,” she said.
Turning away, she moved along the aisle with a movement that was, to Wilson, poorly contrived—too fast to be normal yet, clearly, held back as if to reassure him that she wasn’t fleeing. He felt his stomach churning as he looked out at the wing again.
Abruptly, the man appeared again, landing on the wing like some grotesque ballet dancer. Wilson watched him as he set to work again, straddling the engine casing with his thick, bare legs and picking at the plates.
Well, what was he so concerned about? thought Wilson. That miserable creature couldn’t pry up rivets with his fingernails. Actually, it didn’t matter if the pilots saw him or not—at least so far as the safety of the plane was concerned. As for his own personal reasons—
It was at that moment that the man pried up one edge of a plate.
Wilson gasped. “Here, quickly!” he shouted, noticing, up ahead, the stewardess and the pilot coming through the cockpit doorway.
The Best of Richard Matheson Page 23