Nightmare At 20,000 Feet

by Richard Matheson

  David stood motionless. People began to cluster around him. In a moment, he turned and shouldered by them, pushing through the revolving door. As he came out, the oven heat of July surrounded him. He moved along the sidewalk like a man asleep. On the next block he entered a bar.

  Inside, it was cold and dim. There were no customers. Not even the bartender was visible. David sank down in the shadow of a booth and took his hat off. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  He couldn't do it. He simply could not go up to his office. No matter what Jean said, no matter what anyone said. He clasped his hands on the table edge and squeezed them until the ringers were pressed dry of blood. He just wouldn't.

  "Help you?" asked a voice.

  David opened his eyes. The bartender was standing by the booth, looking down at him.

  "Yes, uh… beer," he said. He hated beer but he knew he had to buy something for the privilege of sitting in the chilly silence undisturbed. He wouldn't drink it.

  The bartender brought the beer and David paid for it. Then, when the bartender had gone, he began to turn the glass slowly on the table top. While he was doing this it began again. With a gasp, he pushed it away. No!, he told it, savagely.

  In a while he got up and left the bar. It was past ten. That didn't matter of course. They knew he was always late. They knew he always tried to break away from it and never could.

  His office was at the back of the suite, a small cubicle furnished only with a rug, sofa, and a small desk on which lay pencils and white paper. It was all he needed. Once, he'd had a secretary but he hadn't liked the idea of her sitting outside the door and listening to him scream.

  No one saw him enter. He let himself in from the hall through a private door. Inside, he relocked the door, then took off his suit coat and laid it across the desk. It was stuffy in the office so he walked across the floor and pulled up the window.

  Far below, the city moved. He stood watching it. How many of them? he thought.

  Sighing heavily, he turned. Well, he was here. There was no point in hesitating any longer. He was committed now. The best thing was to get it over and clear out.

  He drew the blinds, walked over to the couch and lay down. He fussed a little with the pillow, then stretched once and was still. Almost immediately, he felt his limbs going numb.

  It began.

  He did not stop it now. It trickled on his brain like melted ice. It rushed like winter wind. It spun like blizzard vapor. It leaped and ran and billowed and exploded and his mind was filled with it. He grew rigid and began to gasp, his chest twitching with breath, the beating of his heart a violent stagger. His hands drew in like white talons, clutching and scratching at the couch. He shivered and groaned and writhed. Finally he screamed. He screamed for a very long while.

  When it was done, he lay limp and motionless on the couch, his eyes like balls of frozen glass. When he could, he raised his arm and looked at his wristwatch. It was almost two.

  He struggled to his feet. His bones felt sheathed with lead but he managed to stumble to his desk and sit before it.

  There he wrote on a sheet of paper and, when he was finished, slumped across the desk and fell into exhausted sleep.

  Later, he woke up and took the sheet of paper to his superior, who, looking it over, nodded.

  "Four hundred eighty-six, huh?" the superior said. "You're sure of that?"

  "I'm sure," said David, quietly. "I watched every one." He didn't mention that Coulter and his family were among them.

  "All right," said his superior. "Let's see now. Four hundred fifty-two from traffic accidents, eighteen from drowning, seven from sun-stroke, three from fireworks, six from miscellaneous causes."

  Such as a little girl being burned to death, David thought. Such as a baby boy eating ant poison. Such as a woman being electrocuted; a man dying of snake bite.

  "Well," his superior said, "let's make it-oh, four hundred and fifty. It's always impressive when more people die than we predict."

  "Of course," David said.

  The item was on the front page of all the newspapers that afternoon. While David was riding home the man in front of him turned to his neighbour and said, "What I'd like to know is how can they tell?"

  David got up and went back on the platform on the end of the car. Until he got off, he stood there listening to the train wheels and thinking about Labor Day.

  15 – OLD HAUNTS

  Originally he'd intended to spend the one night in town at the Hotel Tiger. But it had occurred to him that maybe his old room was available. It was summer session now and there might not be a student living there. It was certainly worth a try. He could think of nothing more pleasant than sleeping in his old room, in his old bed.The house was the same. He moved up the cement steps, smiling at their still crumbled edges. Same old steps, he thought, still on the bum. As was the sagging screen door to the porch and the doorbell that had to be pushed in at an angle before connection was made. He shook his head, smiling, and wondered if Miss Smith were still alive.

  It wasn't Miss Smith who answered the bell. His heart sank as, instead of her tottering old form, a husky middle-aged woman came bustling to the door.

  "Yes?" she said, her voice a harsh, inhospitable sound.

  "Is Miss Smith still here?" he asked, hoping, in spite of everything, that she was.

  "No, Miss Ada's been dead for years."

  It was like a slap on his face. He felt momentarily stunned as he nodded at the woman.

  "I see," he said then. "I see. I used to room here while I was in college, you see, and I thought…"

  Miss Smith dead.

  "You going to school?" the woman asked.

  He didn't know whether to take it as insult or praise.

  "No, no," he said, "I'm just passing through on my way to Chicago. I graduated many years ago. I wondered if… anyone was living in the old room."

  "The hall room, you mean?" the woman asked, regarding him clinically.

  "That's right."

  "Not till fall," she said.

  "Could I…look at it?"

  "Well, I…"

  "I thought I might stay overnight," he said, hastily, "that is, if-"

  "Oh, that's all right." The woman warmed her tone. "If that's what you want."

  "I would," he said. "Sort of renew old acquaintanceship, you know."

  He smiled self-consciously, wishing he hadn't said that.

  "What would you want to pay?" asked the woman, more concerned with money than with memories.

  "Well, I tell you," he said, impulsively, "I used to pay twenty dollars a month. Suppose I pay you that?"

  "For one night?"

  He felt foolish. But he couldn't back down now even though he felt that his offer had been a nostalgic blunder. No room was worth twenty dollars a night.

  He caught himself. Why quibble? It was worth that much to relive old memories. Twenty dollars was nothing to him anymore. The past was.

  "Glad to pay it," he said. "Well worth it to me."

  He slid the bills from his wallet with awkward fingers and held them out to her.

  He glanced at the bathroom as they walked down the dim lit hall. The familiar sight made him smile. There was something wonderful about returning. He couldn't help it; there just was.

  "Yes, Miss Ada's been dead nigh onto five years," the woman said.

  His smile faded.

  When the woman opened the door to the room he wanted to stand there for a long moment looking at it before letting himself enter once more. But she stood waiting for him and he knew he'd feel ridiculous asking her to wait so he took a deep breath and went in.

  Time travel. The phrase crossed his mind as he entered the room. Because it seemed as if he was suddenly back; the new student stepping into the room for the first time, suitcase in hand, at the beginning of a new adventure.

  He stood there mutely, looking around the room, a sense of inexplicable fright taking hold of him. The room seemed to bring back everything
. Everything. Mary and Norman and Spencer and David and classes and concerts and parties and dances and football games and beer-busts and all-night talks and everything. Memories crowded on him until it seemed that they would crush him.

  "It's a little dusty but I'll clean it up when you go out to eat," the woman said. "I'll go get you some sheets."

  He didn't hear her words or her footsteps moving down the hallway. He stood there possessed by the past.

  He didn't know what it was that made him shudder and look around suddenly. It wasn't a sound or anything he saw. It was a feeling in his body and mind; a sense of unreasonable foreboding.

  He jumped with a gasp as the door slammed violently shut. "It's the wind does it," said the woman returning with sheets for his old bed.

  Broadway The traffic light turned red and he eased down the brake. His gaze moved across the store fronts.

  There was the Crown Drug Store, still the same. Next to it, Flora Dame's Shoe Store. His eyes moved across the street. The Glendale Shop was still there. Barth's Clothes was still in its old location too.

  Something in his mind seemed to loosen and he realized that he had been afraid of seeing the town changed. For when he'd turned the corner onto Broadway and seen that Mrs. Sloane's Book Shoppe and The College Grille were gone he'd felt almost a sense of betrayal. The town he remembered existed intact in his mind and it gave him a tense, restless feeling to see it partially changed. It was like meeting an old friend and discovering, with a shock, that one of his legs was gone.

  But enough things were the same to bring the solemn smile back to his lips.

  The College Theatre where he and his friends had gone to midnight shows on Saturday nights after a date or long hours of study. The Collegiate Bowling Alleys; upstairs from them, the pool room.

  And downstairs…

  Impulsively, he pulled the car to the curb and switched off the motor. He sat there looking, for a moment, at the entrance to the Golden Campus. Then he slid quickly from the car.

  The same old awning hung over the doorway, its once gaudy colours worn conservative by time and weather. He moved forward, a smile playing on his lips.

  Then a sense of overpowering depression struck him as he stood looking down the steep, narrow staircase. He caught hold of the railing with his fingers and, after hesitating, let himself down slowly. He hadn't remembered the stairway being this narrow.

  Near the bottom of the stairs, a whirring sound reached his ears. Someone was waxing the small dance floor with rotary brushes. He moved down the last step and saw the small black man following the gently bucking machine around the floor. He saw and heard the metal nose of the polisher bump into one of the columns that marked the boundaries of the dance floor.

  Another frown crossed his face. The place was so small, so dingy. Surely memory hadn't erred that badly. No, he hastily explained to himself. No, it was because the place was empty and there were no lights. It was because the jukebox wasn't frothing with coloured bubbles and there were no couples dancing.

  Unconsciously, he slid his hands into his trouser pockets, a pose he hadn't assumed more than once or twice since he'd left college eighteen years before. He moved closer to the dance floor, nodding once to the low, battered bandstand as one would to an old acquaintance.

  He stood by the dance floor edge and thought of Mary.

  How many times had they circled that tiny area, moving to the rhythms that pulsed from the glowing jukebox? Dancing slowly, their bodies intimately close, her warm hand idly stroking the back of his neck. How many times? Something tightened in his stomach. He could almost see her face again. He turned away quickly from the dance floor and looked at the dark wooden booths.

  A forced smile raised his lips. Were they still there? He moved around the edge of a column and started for the back.

  "You lookin' for somebody?" the old black man asked.

  "No, no," he said. "I just want to look at something."

  He moved down the rows of booths, trying to ignore the feeling of awkwardness. Which one is it? he asked himself. He couldn't remember; they all looked the same. He stopped, hands on hips, and looked at all the booths, shaking his head slowly. On the dance floor, the black man finished his polishing, pulled the plug out and drew the lumbering machine away. The place grew deathly still.

  He found them in the third booth he looked at. Worn thin, the letters almost as dark as the surrounding wood but, most assuredly, there. He slid into the booth and looked at them.

  B.J. Bill Johnson. And, under the initials, the year 1939.

  He thought about all the nights he and Spence and Dave and Norm had sat in this booth dissecting the universe with the deft, assured scalpels of college seniors.

  "We thought we had it all," he murmured. "Every darn bit of it."

  Slowly, he took off his hat and set it down on the table. What he wished for now was a glass of the old beer: that thick, malty brew that filled your veins and pumped your heart, as Spence used to say.

  He nodded his head in appreciation, toasting a quiet toast.

  "To you," he whispered. "The unbeatable past."

  As he said it, he looked up from the table and saw a young man standing far across the room at the shadowy foot of the stairway. Johnson looked at the young man, unable to see him sharply without his glasses on.

  After a moment, the young man turned and went back up the stairs. Johnson smiled to himself. Come back at six, he thought. The place doesn't open till six.

  That made him think again of all the nights he'd spent down here in the musty dimness, drinking beer, talking, dancing, spending his youth with the casual improvidence of a millionaire.

  He sat silent in the semi-darkness, memories swirling about him like a restless tide, lapping at his mind, forcing him to keep his lips pressed together because he knew that all this was gone forever.

  In the midst of it, the memory of her came again. Mary, he thought and he wondered what had ever become of Mary?

  It started again as he walked under the archway that led to the campus. An uneasy feeling that past and present were blending, that he was tightrope-walking between the two of them, on the verge of falling into either one.

  The feeling dogged his steps, chilling the sense of elation he felt at being back.

  He'd look at a building, thinking of the classes he'd taken there, the people he'd known there. Then, almost in the same moment, he'd see his present life, the dull empty rounds of selling. The months and years of solitary driving around the country. Ending only in return to a home he disliked, a wife he did not love.

  He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he'd been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He'd thought it a mistake to choose so early in life and embrace the present good. He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time.

  That feeling again: a combination of sensations. A creeping dissatisfaction that gnawed at him and choked him-and a restless, pursued feeling. An inescapable urge to look over his shoulder and see who was following him. He couldn't dismiss it and it bothered and upset him.

  Now he was walking along the east side of the campus, his suit coat thrown over his right arm, his woven hat cocked back on his balding head. He could feel small sweat drops trickling down his back as he walked.

  He wondered if he should stop and sit on the campus awhile. There were several students sprawled out under the trees, laughing and chatting.

  But he was leery of speaking to students anymore. Just before he'd come onto the campus, he'd stopped at the Campus Cafe for a glass of iced tea. He'd sat next to a student there and tried to start a conversation.

  The young man had treated him with insufferable deference. He hadn't said anything about it, of course, but it had been highly offensive.

  Something else had happened too. While he was moving for the cashier's booth, a young man had walked by outsi
de. Johnson had thought he knew him and had raised his arm to catch the student's attention.

  Then he'd realized it was impossible that he knew any of the current students and he'd guiltily lowered his arm. He had paid his check, feeling very depressed.

  The depression still clung to him as he walked up the steps of the Liberal Arts Building.

  He turned at the head of the steps and looked back over the campus. In spite of deflated sentiment, it gave him a lift to see the campus still the same. It, at least, was unchanged and there was some sense of continuity in the world.

  He smiled and turned, then turned again. Was there someone following him? The feeling was certainly strong enough. His worried gaze moved over the campus without seeing anything unusual. With an irritated shrug, he walked into the building.

  It was still the same too and it made him feel good to walk on the dark tile floors again, beneath the ceiling murals, up the marble steps, through the soundproof, air-cooled halls.

  He didn't notice the face of the student who walked by him even though their shoulders almost touched. He did seem to notice the student looking at him. But he wasn't sure and, when he looked over his shoulder, the student had turned a corner.

  The afternoon passed slowly He walked from building to building, entering each one religiously, looking at bulletin boards, glancing into classrooms and smiling carefully-timed smiles at everything.

  But he was beginning to feel a desire to run away. He resented the fact that no one spoke to him. He thought of going to the alumni director and chatting with him but he decided against it. He didn't want to seem pretentious. He was just an ex-student quietly visiting the scenes of his college days. That was all. No point in making a show of it.

  As he walked back to the room that evening after supper, he had the definite impression that someone was following him.

  Yet, whenever he stopped with a suspicious frown and looked back, there was nothing. Only the sound of cars honking down on Broadway or the laughter of young men up in their rooms.