Scareforce

by Charles Hough

“Why? Is there something wrong with this house?” She is curious about the attitude of her new neighbor.

  “No, no, nothing wrong. Nothing that I know of. Wish we had a single.”

  There is something a little too emphatic in the neighbor’s denial but your wife decides to let it pass.

  In the days and nights to come she thinks back to this conversation.

  Things start slowly. It seems that the shock of moving has infected every member of the Simms family with a case of forgetfulness. Everyone starts to lose things. Nothing big, just irritating. If Mrs. Simms is sure the car keys are on the desk, they aren’t found until she looks on the bedroom dresser. And if you are sure that you left the checkbook in your coat, it turns up in the kitchen cabinet. Even your little girl, Sherry, complains that her dolls are playing hide-and-seek when she wants to play school.

  It doesn’t seem anything but annoying until things start to turn up in the most unlikely places. What had prompted you to leave your ring in the flour canister? And why did Mrs. Simms ever put her silver napkin holder out in the garage in the lawn mower basket? It is as if some little imp is pressing the limits of possibility to see how far he can go before someone gets suspicious.

  When your wife finds the dog staring stupidly at the doll’s head in his food dish, things finally get to be too much. She can’t wait to tell her husband about the rash of lost-and-founds.

  That night, after listening to your wife recite a list of improbabilities, you consider the strange occurrences as you drive down to the base minimart. You recognize a neighbor in the line with you. He introduces himself.

  “Oh, you must be the one who moved into that strange house on the corner.”

  You register surprise at this description of your new house.

  “Why do you call it strange?”

  “No reason really. It just seems to be empty more than it’s occupied. And there must be something wrong with the electricity because the lights keep going on and off even when nobody’s living there. You notice anything strange?“

  You consider the question. You decide that the rash of missing items doesn’t really qualify as strange.

  “Nope. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a real nice house.”

  “You’re probably right. What do I know? Nice to meet you anyway.”

  During the next couple of days you think more and more about your “strange” house. You finally stop by the housing office to see if you can find out anything about it.

  When the clerk comes to the window, you suddenly think this whole thing is pretty dumb. What are you doing here? The clerk recognizes you from the day the house was assigned.

  “What can I do for you, Sergeant Simms?”

  “Ah… I just wondered. Is there anything unusual about that house you gave me?” you finally manage to stammer. Your question sounds foolish even before you finish asking it.

  “Is there something wrong with the house?” The woman seems almost defensive.

  “No, well, no nothing really.”

  “Do you want to lodge a complaint about the house?”

  “No, no complaint.” You’re really confused by her attitude.

  “Then I guess we can be of no further help to you, Sergeant Simms. Good day.”

  You say good day to her as she is already turning away and leave more disturbed than when you came in.

  A few days later the house finally becomes a comfortable place to relax in and sleep in. You hope it will just keep getting more homey.

  Mrs. Simms wakes, confused. It’s only 3:00 A.M. but something disturbs her. “What is it?” she thinks. “Oh, the baby. The baby is crying.” Not too loudly but mothers have well-tuned hearing.

  “Whose turn is it for the night patrol?” She still laughs at her husband’s term for the late-night baby comforting chores.

  Confusion. That joke is at least three years old. It came from back when they had a baby. Sherry is a grown-up five-year-old who has no residual baby in her. She has been sleeping through the night for years now.

  Must be the neighbors’ child. These triplexes might save the government money but they sure don’t make for quiet nights. She tries to avoid it but she learns more than she wants to about her neighbors though the walls. Must be Jenney’s girl. She had hard times with every little illness that infants were prone to.

  Memory intrudes. Jenney was one of the committee who fared her well. Mrs. Simms doesn’t live in the triplex with Jenney and her baby anymore. She doesn’t live in a triplex anymore. That can’t be a baby in the house or the building. The Simms family is the only family in this house.

  She stiffens and grabs her husband’s hand reflexively.

  “I know,” you answer her unasked question. “I hear it too.”

  “Who is it? What is it?”

  You listen together as the baby cries. Sad and lonely sound. So helpless. So lost.

  It’s as if you’ve turned a corner or opened another door in the house. Suddenly everyone is treated to all manner of strange sounds.

  At night there are footsteps. Slow, pacing steps always ending in the unused bedroom between your room and Sherry’s. Cupboards open and close as if someone is looking for something. Looking but not too intent on finding. Just searching for something to do. Suddenly the beautiful house that had started becoming a home is just a building again. You try to overlook and disregard the unusual but it’s impossible. Sleep becomes a commodity in short supply for all. Tempers flare and cool and flare again much too often.

  A feeling of sadness begins to pervade. But it seems to be a borrowed sadness. Nothing in your lives would account for the degree or flavor of sadness you feel.

  Late one night in April, two months after you moved in and one month after you found the house owned by another entity, the two of you lie in the darkness. There are no sounds except those of the living. In a way that is worse. You wait. And you wonder. What next?

  You wake surprised that you dozed off. There’s your wife, standing at the window in the dark. You watch her without speaking. Even turned from you you can see the sadness in her. You long to take it away, to start over. This has not been a good move.

  As if sensing your empathy, she turns slowly from the window. You see that she is sad, very sad indeed, but she is not your wife.

  You wait again at the same desk in the housing office, but this time you know why you are here.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to ask,” you explain to the same clerk. “I need another house. If I can get one on base, great. But I have to move my family. I can’t explain it, but I have to get out of that house.”

  “No need to explain, Sergeant.” She sighs as if this is something she expected. “Just sign here and we’ll get you in a new place tomorrow. Won’t be a single; probably have to be a quad, but that’s the best we can do.”

  “No, no, a quad’ll be fine.”

  You sign the document quickly, then turn to leave. You hesitate.

  “What is it? What’s wrong with that house?”

  “I don’t know that anything is officially wrong with that dwelling.” She looks hard into your eyes.

  “If you have some time, take a look at some old newspapers at the library. Especially the one for the fourteenth of February, ten years ago.”

  Later that afternoon, you sit back from the microfilm viewer. You think what it must have been like. To be a young mother, a thousand miles from home, on a strange base, when the letter arrived in the hand of the base chaplain. When the words finally found meaning that night, that her husband really wouldn’t be coming back, back to the same house that you live in now.

  They found her in the baby’s bedroom by the tiny form of her child. Both were still and composed. Both were cold. The paper had printed her picture, from her wedding. The expression was worlds apart, but it was the same girl that had looked out of your window.

  We always lose something when we move. But sometime.; we find something. Something that someone else left behind. Or someone. />
  DEADSTICK LANDING

  WAR is the strangest way of life. At first you are petrified with fright. So many ways to die. So many chances to take. But then you live through a few of them and realize it’s not so bad. And then you start to lose friends to stupid mistakes and fatal illnesses that have nothing to do with war. And then it becomes really frightening: all these new ways to die and all the old ones, too. And then out of nowhere you become convinced that there is something else beyond all this death. Strange things happen in war.

  When Harry Lordon met the F-4 for the first time, he was struck by one singular impression: the jet was huge! Walking around the McDonnell Douglas Phantom II on the blazing concrete ramp, Harry was amazed that a warship this big had been constructed to carry just two fliers. But then again it had actually been designed to carry something much different from the two aviators who controlled the beast. It was built to carry weapons, lots of weapons.

  The F-4D could carry the war to the enemy. The Phantom was a flying war store. It could carry anything from light harassing antipersonnel munitions to the the big ones that can end a war or a world. The exhaust ports of the twin GE afterburning turbojets were as big as caves and when the JP-4 poured in and was ignited by the afterburners, they looked like twin entrances to the heart of hell.

  Harry had been trained to feed the monsters of aerial combat. He had already been in-country for almost a year, fitting other aircraft with weapons. This would be his first experience with the 4. He looked forward to the challenge.

  The F-4 had been developed for the Navy as a carrier-based, multirole attack aircraft. At first the Navy was not impressed. Even the men who fly it know that the Phantom is not just another pretty face. But when it started beating the snot out of the Navy’s best fighters, the brass started to take note. When the Air Force got a look at the Navy’s new toy, they just had to have some. In fact, the Tactical Air Command immediately replaced over half of its fighter force with F-4s.

  It was called the most versatile combat jet in the American arsenal. And now Harry was going to get to work on the best.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. In these hectic days of the buildup in Southeast Asia, things were changing almost too rapidly to keep up. The brass kept throwing more and more tasks at the F-4s and their drivers. New weapons were hitting the ramp still wet from the drawing board. New roles for airborne platforms like the Phantom were being dreamed up almost daily by the half-mad planners in the dark world business. The crews didn’t know what to expect next.

  Harry had heard a couple of pilots discussing weapons on the bus back from the flight line. They were incredulous.

  “I mean it. When I looked under the wing, somebody had stuck a big green thing with a four-foot daisy cutter on my bomb rack. It had candy stripes all around the ass end. And the crew chief didn’t know what it was either. He just told me I better stay away from it because he heard it growl. I didn’t know whether to drop it or take it out for a walk.”

  Harry had chuckled but he knew that it was even more of a problem for the munitions maintenance types. They sometime got tech data for the strange new weapons that were stamped “experimental.” It didn’t give you a warm fuzzy feeling about handling the bombs.

  Harry quickly settled into the normal routine of the new base and new aircraft. It was easy because there was nothing normal about it. They seemed to be making it up as they went along. Everyone got to know everything about all the jobs in his shop. They were called upon to do things that they had never imagined. They never got bored. Every day brought some new job, some new challenge, or some new problems. They put in hours that would have been back-breaking if they’d had the time to notice. But they didn’t. They worked through their shifts and into the next.

  They were doing vital, exciting work in the middle of a war. They were inventing, doing things that had never been done before. The adrenaline rush kept them from noticing how overworked they really were. It was like the ancient Chinese curse. “May you live in interesting times.” These were certainly interesting times.

  It was a time of heavy hardships. War always is. The youngest, the best, the smartest could suddenly be ripped from the scene. Death was a constant reminder of the seriousness of the game. But it was also a period of unequaled camaraderie. Shared adversity can do that to a group of people. Everyone was working hard and everyone knew the importance of the others’ jobs. In such times of critical peril generated by war, you learned to respect the people who helped you. What it came down to was that your butt was constantly and literally on the line. Everyone had to pull together so that everyone could go home in one piece.

  The long hours that Harry and his coworkers were putting in and the ingenuity that they used every day was being recognized by more people than just his supervisors. The crews who flew the F-4s that they loaded and the people who commanded those crews knew what a great job their weapon types were doing. That was it exactly. They started to think of the hardworking weaponeers as “their weapons guys.” The brass took a real sense of pride in their accomplishments. The flyers saw evidence of the great job the weaponeers were doing in the most critical situations. The bombs came off the racks and exploded on impact with the pilot-killing SAM sites. The missiles came off the rails in the most violent, last-ditch maneuvers and sped off to home in on the bad guys and bring them to justice. And the racks did not jam and the rails did not lock to endanger the warrior and his bird when they limped back home from the fray.

  The powers-that-be noticed this. They noticed that the targets were getting destroyed. They noticed that the enemy was getting less and less anxious to engage their fighters. And they noticed that more of their young warriors were returning to their bases to fight another day.

  They noticed and they went out of their way to show their gratitude. Every chance they got they were around Harry and his friends, shaking hands, slapping backs, and buying drinks. They always had time to answer questions and stay after a flight and help solve problems. They remembered names and faces. And they thought of ways to recognize and reward the superhuman efforts of all the people who worked behind the lines in the war effort.

  At the base where Harry worked, the commander spent much time talking to his people. He had learned a lot about them. And he had learned an amazing fact. Many of the young men who worked so hard for the air war effort had never themselves flown in an airplane other than the airliner that brought them to the war. This was unheard of to the colonel. He had grown up flying. He lived to fly. He thought that the greatest thing a man could do was to strap on a big jet, like the F-4, and swoop into the skies.

  The colonel was a man who could get things done. He resolved to do something about this situation. He had to show his people some of the good things about the flying business. He called in his flight leaders and then he called in the commanders of all the support squadrons. He proposed to them a reward system for their workers. When they singled out a man or woman for duty above and beyond, in addition to the medal or certificate that was the usual reward, the colonel and his men would add something. If the honoree liked, the commander would provide a ride in one of the company war birds with a seasoned fighter pilot.

  The word spread like wildfire through Harry’s squadron. Men who were tasked to the maximum now worked harder. Everyone wanted a chance to slip the surly bounds of earth in the Air Force’s best fighter. Harry felt the same. He worked with the goal in mind for the next week. Then work drove it out of his mind.

  Harry was assigned to start arming the big jets with a new generation weapon, a so-called smart bomb. The Air Force didn’t like that term. It seemed to imply that the rest of their munitions were dumb. But the bomb looked smart. It seemed to intimidate by its obvious technical sophistication. Harry sweated over the specs for the new bomb. He learned everything he could through long hours of study. Then he spent even longer hours briefing the crews on how the weapon worked. They listened to Harry. He quickly became their expert. And when they fina
lly took the new “smart bomb” out to introduce it to the war, it worked better than advertised.

  When they rode back to the base after employing their smart friend, they couldn’t stop talking about it. How the weapon swept through the jungle, avoiding the wrong points and finding the target. How it actually flew into the mouth of a cave and eliminated a cache of weapons that Charlie had stored inside.

  And when the shouting was done, they remembered Harry. The crews themselves put him in for a medal for all his long and hard work to arm them with this wonder weapon. They saw to it that the paperwork went through as fast as possible. And they carried the orders to Harry themselves.

  Harry was amazed that they had gone to this trouble. He was embarrassed by all the attention over someone just doing his job. But when they reminded him of the added bonus that went with the medal, Harry couldn’t contain his glee. Finally he would get to blast off in the backseat of a supersonic Phantom.

  The day of his flight dawned on perfect weather. Harry was up and ready a full two hours before he was to report to Base Operations. He hung around the windows to the flight line, cheering inwardly every time an F-4 climbed out on the end of a bright blue flame.

  “Hi, Harry, I guess I’m your chauffeur for the day.”

  Harry swung away from the window and promptly tripped over his own tongue. The speaker, the pilot assigned to take him up on his reward flight, was none other than the vice wing commander.

  “Yes sir, I guess sir, thank you sir.” Harry saluted so hard he almost hurt his forehead. The colonel put him at ease immediately and headed him out to the flight line. On the way to their designated jet, he talked to Harry about the operation of the weapons shop. Harry was amazed to find out just how much the old man new about the operation. By the time the colonel helped him strap into the fighter’s rear ejection seat, Harry felt as though they were old friends.

  With the cockpit canopy closed the sound of the big jet was totally different on the inside. It was rumbling that you felt more than heard. Even taxiing out to the runway was a thrill. Harry waved to a weapons crew as they drove by, not realizing that the helmet and oxygen mask he wore were a perfect disguise.