Nightmare At 20,000 Feet

by Richard Matheson

  A chill covered me. I gave her the number. She told me there wasn't any such number.

  The phone fell out of my hand and clattered on the floor. Mary stood up at her desk and looked over. The operator was saying, "Hello, hello, hello…" I hurriedly put the phone back in the cradle.

  "What happened?" Mary asked when I came back to my desk.

  "I dropped the phone." I said.

  I sat and worked and shivered with cold.

  I'm afraid to tell Mary about Mike and his wife Gladys.

  I'm afraid she'll say she never heard of them.

  Friday

  Today I checked up on Design Handbook. Information told me there was no such publication listed. But I went over to the city anyway. Mary was angry about me going. But I had to go.I went to the building. I looked at the directory in the lobby. And even though I knew I wouldn't find the magazine listed there, it was still a shock that made me feel sick and hollow.

  I was dizzy as I rode up the elevator. I felt as if I were drifting away from everything.

  I got off at the third floor at the exact spot where I'd called for Jean that afternoon.

  There was a textile company there.

  "There never was a magazine here?" I asked the receptionist.

  "Not as long as I can remember," she said. "Of course I've only been here three years."

  I went home. I told Mary I was sick and didn't want to go to work tonight. She said all right she wouldn't go either. I went into the bedroom to be alone. I stood in the place where we're going to put the new bed when it's delivered next week.

  Mary came in. She stood in the doorway restively.

  "Bob, what's the matter?" she asked. "Don't I have a right to know?"

  "Nothing," I told her.

  "Oh, please don't tell me that," she said. "I know there is."

  I started toward her. Then I turned away.

  "I… I have to write a letter," I said.

  "Who to?"

  I flared up. "That's my business," I said. Then I told her to Jim.

  She turned away. "I wish I could believe you," she said.

  "What does that mean?" I asked. She looked at me for a long moment and then turned away again.

  "Give Jim my best," she said, and her voice shook. The way she said it made me shudder.

  I sat down and wrote the letter to Jim. I decided he might help. Things were too desperate for secrecy. I told him that Mike was gone. I asked him if he remembered Mike.

  Funny. My hand hardly shook at all. Maybe that's the way it is when you're almost gone.

  Saturday

  Mary had to work on some special typing today. She left early.After I had breakfast I got the bank book out of the metal box in the bedroom closet. I was going down to the bank to get the money for the bed.

  At the bank I filled out a withdrawal slip for $97. Then I waited in line and finally handed the slip and the book to the teller.

  He opened it and looked up with a frown.

  "This supposed to be funny?" he asked.

  "What do you mean, funny?"

  He pushed the book across to me. "Next," he said.

  I guess I shouted. "What's the matter with you!"

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the men at the front desks jump up and hurry over. A woman behind me said, "Let me at the window, if you please."

  The man came fussing up.

  "What seems to be the trouble, sir?" he asked me.

  "The teller refuses to honour my bank book," I told him.

  He asked for the book and I handed it to him. He opened it. Then he looked up in surprise. He spoke quietly.

  "This book is blank," he said.

  I grabbed it and stared at it, my heart pounding.

  It was completely unused.

  "Oh, my God," I moaned.

  "Perhaps we can check on the number of the book," the man said. "Why don't you step over to my desk?"

  But there wasn't any number on the book. I saw that. And I felt tears coming into my eyes.

  "No," I said. "No." I walked past him and started toward the doorway

  "One moment, sir," he called after me.

  I ran out and ran all the way home.

  I waited in the front room for Mary to come home. I'm waiting now. I'm looking at the bank book. At the line where we both signed our names. At the spaces where we had made our deposits. Fifty dollars from her parents on our first anniversary

  Two hundred and thirty dollars from my veteran's insurance dividend. Twenty dollars. Ten dollars.

  All blank.

  Everything is going. Jean. Sally. Mike. Names fluttering away and the people with them.

  Now this. What's next?

  Later

  I know.Mary hasn't come home.

  I called up the office. I heard Sam answer and I asked him if Mary was there. He said I must have the wrong number, no Mary works there. I told him who I was. I asked him if I worked there.

  "Stop the kidding around," he said. "See you Monday night."

  I called up my cousin, my sister, her cousin, her sister, her parents. No answer. Not even ringing. None of the numbers work. Then they're all gone.

  Sunday

  I don't know what to do. All day I've been sitting in the living room looking out at the street. I've been watching to see if anybody I know comes by the house. But they don't. They're all strangers.I'm afraid to leave the house. That's all there is left. Our furniture and our clothes.

  I mean my clothes. Her closet is empty. I looked into it this morning when I woke up and there wasn't a scrap of clothing left. It's like a magic act, everything disappearing, it's like…

  I just laughed. I must be…

  I called the furniture store. It's open Sunday afternoons. They said they had no record of us buying a bed. Would I like to come in and check?

  I hung up and looked out the window some more.

  I thought of calling up my aunt in Detroit. But I can't remember the number. And it isn't in my address book any more. The entire book is blank. Except for my name on the cover stamped in gold.

  My name. Only my name. What can I say? What can I do? Everything is so simple. There's nothing to do.

  I've been looking at my photograph album. Almost all the pictures are different. There aren't any people on them.

  Mary is gone and all of our friends and our relatives.

  It's funny

  In the wedding picture I sit all by myself at a huge table covered with food. My left arm is out and bent as though I were embracing my bride. And all along the table are glasses floating in the air.

  Toasting me.

  Monday morning

  I just got back the letter I sent Jim. It has NO SUCH ADDRESS stamped on the envelope.I tried to catch the mailman but I couldn't. He was gone before I woke up.

  I went down to the grocer before. He knew me. But when I asked him about Mary he said stop kidding, I'd die a bachelor and we both knew it.

  I have only one more idea. It's a risk, but I'll have to take it. I'll have to leave the house and go downtown to the Veteran's Administration. I want to see if my records are there. If they are, they'll have something about my schooling and about my marriage and the people who were in my life.

  I'm taking this book with me. I don't want to lose it. If I lost it, then I wouldn't have a thing in the world to remind me that I'm not insane.

  Monday night

  The house is gone.I'm sitting in the corner candy store.

  When I got back from the V.A. I found an empty lot there. I asked some of the boys playing there if they knew me. They said they didn't. I asked them what happened to the house. They said they'd been playing in that empty lot since they were babies.

  The V.A. didn't have any records about me. Not a thing.

  That means I'm not even a person now. All I have is all I am, my body and the clothes on it. All the identification papers are gone from my wallet.

  My watch is gone too. Just like that. From my wrist.
/>   It had an inscription on the back. I remember it.

  To my own darling with all my love. Mary.

  I'm having a cup of cof

  8 – LEGION OF PLOTTERS

  Then there was the man who sniffed interminably…He sat next to Mr Jasper on the bus. Every morning he would come grunting up the front step and weave along the aisle to plop himself down beside Mr Jasper's slight form.

  And – sniff! he would go as he perused his morning paper – sniff, sniff!

  Mr Jasper would writhe. And wonder why the man persisted in sitting next to him. There were other seats available, yet the man invariably dropped his lumpish frame beside Mr Jasper and sniffed the miles away, winter and summer.

  It wasn't as if it were cold out. Some Los Angeles mornings were coldish, granted. But they certainly did not warrant this endless sniffling as though pneumonia were creeping through the man's system.

  And it gave Mr Jasper the willies.

  He made several attempts to remove himself from the man's sphere of sniffling. First of all, he moved back two seats from his usual location. The man followed him. I see, surmised a near-fuming Mr Jasper, the man is in the habit of sitting by me and hasn't noticed that I've moved back two seats.

  The following day Mr Jasper sat on the other side of the aisle. He sat with irascible eye watching the man weave his bulk up the aisle. Then his vitals petrified as the man's tweeded person plumped down by him. He glared an abominating glare out the window.

  Sniff! – went the man – Sa-niff! – and Mr Jasper's dental plates ground together in porcelain fury.

  The next day he sat near the back of the bus. The man sat next to him. The next day he sat near the front of the bus. The man sat next to him. Mr Jasper sat amidst his corroding patience for a mile and a third. Then, jaded beyond endurance, he turned to the man.

  'Why are you following me?' he asked, his voice a trembling plaint.

  The man was caught in mid-sniff. He gaped at Mr Jasper with cow like, uncomprehending eyes. Mr Jasper stood and stumbled the bus length away from the man. There he stood swaying from the overhead bar, his eyes as stone. The way that sniffing fool had looked at him, he brooded. It was insufferable. As if, by heaven, he had done something offensive!

  Well, at least, he was momentarily free of those diurnally dripping nostrils. Crouched muscles unflexed gratefully. He signed with relief.

  And the boy standing next to him whistled twenty-three choruses of Dixie.

  Mr Jasper sold neckties.

  It was an employment ridden with vexations, an employment guaranteed to scrape away the lining of any but the most impassive stomachs.

  Mr Jasper's stomach walls were of the most susceptive variety.

  They were stormed daily by aggravation, by annoyance and by women. Women who lingered and felt the wool and cotton and silk and walked away with no purchase. Women who beleaguered Mr Jasper's inflammable mind with interrogations and decrees and left no money but only a rigid Mr Jasper, one jot nearer to inevitable detonation.

  With every taxing customer, a gushing host of brilliantly nasty remarks would rise up in Mr Jasper's mind, each one surpassing the one before. His mind would positively ache to see them free, to let them pour like torrents of acid across his tongue and, burning hot, spout directly into the women's faces.

  But invariably close was the menacing phantom of floorwalker or store buyer. It flitted through his mind with ghostly dominion, shunting aside his yearning tongue, calcifying his bones with unspent wrath.

  Then there were the women in the store cafeteria… They talked while they ate and they smoked and blew clouds of nicotine into his lungs at the very moment he was trying to ingest a bowl of tomato soup into his ulcered stomach. Poof! went the ladies and waved their pretty hands to dispel the unwanted smoke.

  Mr Jasper got it all.

  Eyes beginning to emboss, he would wave it back. The women returned it. Thus did the smoke circulate until thinned out or reinforced by new, yet more intense, exhalations. Poof! And between waving and ladling and swallowing, Mr Jasper had spasms. The tannic acid of his tea hardly served to stem the course of burning in his stomach. He would pay his forty cents with oscillating fingers and return to work, a cracking man.

  To face a full afternoon of complaints and queries and thumbing of merchandise and the topping of all by the girl who shared the counter with him and chewed gum as though she wanted the people in Arabia to hear her chewing. The smacking and the popping and the grinding made Mr Jasper's insides do frenzied contortions, made him stand statue like and disordered or else burst out with a hissing:

  'Stop that disgusting sound!'

  Life was full of irritations.

  Then there were the neighbours, the people who lived upstairs and on the sides. The society of them, that ubiquitous brotherhood which always lived in the apartments around Mr Jasper.

  They were a unity, those people. There was a touchstone of attitude in their behaviour, a distinct criterion of method.

  It consisted of walking with extra weighty tread, of reassembling furniture with sustained regularity, of throwing wild and noisy parties every other night and inviting only those people who promised to wear hobnailed boots and dance the chicken reel. Of arguing about all subjects at top voice, of playing only cowboy and hillbilly music on a radio whose volume knob was irretrievably stuck at its farthest point. Of owning a set of lungs disguised as a two to twelve months old child, which puffed out each morning to emit sounds reminiscent of the lament of air raid sirens.

  Mr Jasper's present nemesis was Albert Radenhausen, Junior, age seven months, possessor of one set of incredibly hardy lungs which did their best work between four and five in the morning.

  Mr Jasper would find himself rolling on to his thin back in the dark, furnished, two-room apartment. He would find himself staring at the ceiling and waiting for the sound. It got to a point where his brain dragged him from needed sleep exactly ten seconds before four each morning. If Albert Radenhausen, Junior, chose to slumber on, it did no good to Mr Jasper. He just kept waiting for the cries.

  He would try to sleep, but jangling concentration made him prey, if not to the expected wailing, then to the host of other sounds which beset his hypersensitive ears.

  A car coughing past in the street. A rattle of Venetian blind. A set of lone footsteps somewhere in the house. The drip of a faucet, the barking of a dog, the rubbing legs of crickets, the creaking of wood. Mr Jasper could not control it all. Those sound makers he could not stuff, pad, twist off, adjust to – kept plaguing him. He would shut his eyes until they hurt, grip tight fists at his sides.

  Sleep still eluded. He would jolt up, heaving aside the sheets and blankets, and sit there staring numbly into the blackness, waiting for Albert Radenhausen, Junior, to make his utterance so he could lie down again.

  Analysing in the blackness, his mind would click out progressions of thought. Unduly sensitive? – he would comment within. I deny this vociferously. I am aware, Mr Jasper would self-claim. No more. I have ears. I can hear, can't I?

  It was suspicious.

  What morning in the litter of mornings that notion came, Mr Jasper could not recall. But once it had come it would not be dismissed. Though the definition of it was blunted by passing days, the core remained unremovable.

  Sometimes in a moment of teeth-gritting duress, the idea would reoccur. Other times it would be only a vague current of impression flowing beneath the surface.

  But it stuck. All these things that happened to him. Were they subjective or objective, within or without? They seemed to pile up so often, each detail linking until the sum of provocations almost drove him mad. It almost seemed as though it were done with intent. As if…

  As if it were a plan.

  Mr Jasper experimented.

  Initial equipment consisted of one white pad, lined, plus his ball-point pen. Primary approach consisted of jotting down various exasperations with the time of their occurrence, the location, the sex of the offe
nder and the relative grossness of the annoyance; this last aspect gradated by numbers ranging from one to ten.

  Example one, clumsily notated while still half asleep.

  Baby crying, 4.52 a.m., next door to room, male, 7.

  Following this entry, Mr Jasper settled back on his flattened pillow with a sigh approximating satisfaction. The start was made. In a few days he would know with assurance if his unusual speculation was justified.

  Before he left the house at eight-seventeen a.m., Mr Jasper had accumulated three more entries; viz:

  Loud thumping on floor, 6.33 a.m., upstairs from room, male (guess), 5.

  Traffic noise, 7.00 a.m. outside of room, males, 6.

  Radio on loud, 7.40 a.m. on, upstairs from room, female, 7.

  One rather odd facet of Mr Jasper's efforts came to his attention as he left his small apartment. This was, in short, that he had put down much of his temper through this simple expedient of written analysis. Not that the various noises had failed, at first, to set his teeth on edge and cause his hands to flex involuntarily at his sides. They had not. Yet the translation of amorphous vexation into words, the reduction of an aggravation to one succinct memorandum somehow helped. It was strange but pleasing.

  The bus trip to work provided further notations.

  The sniffing man drew one immediate and automatic entry. But once that irritant was disposed of, Mr Jasper was alarmed to note the rapid accumulation of four more. No matter where he moved on the bus there was fresh cause for drawing pen-point from scabbard and stabbing out more words.

  Garlic breath, 8.27 a.m., bus, male, 7.

  Heavy jostling, 8.28 a.m., bus, both sexes, 8.