We sped towards a blazing ruin, feeling its heat in the air that washed over us and smelling the smoke that rose like a blooming dark flower before the wind took it away.
***
‘Burnt beyond recognition’ was the euphemism we used. He looked like meat forgotten on a barbeque, blackened and blistered and parts of him greasy. Smelled like it, too, beneath the putrid chemical stench of fuel and plastic and cloth and metal. Everything burns in a jet fuel fire. Everything. He was only a small lump with smaller lumps protruding, legs stiff and feetless, arms angled out like wings of his own but not much left below the elbows. His head was half its usual size, a shrunken seed, shrivelled and crisp and without any facial features. He was checked carefully, not by Doc but by some guy they brought in specially who prodded and cut and finally burnt Sam all over again. Cremated him, whatever his wishes might have been. Nobody ever told Sandy why. We scattered him on the airfield. Sandy said he would have wanted that, though it was clear she felt some final resentment, like she was being put second one final time.
Sam dying put my life on a different course. Or Sandra did, but Sam had to die for that to happen. With Sandy I became a different man, a better man. For a while, anyway, and a long while at that. Had Sam’s shoes to fill, didn’t I. His memory to live up to. I never managed it, of course, though Sandra helped me cut down on the drinking when other women had failed and I stopped chasing other girls, now that I understood why Sam barely even noticed them. There’d only ever been one for me, and I think she knew it long before Sam was gone. I took a sidestep at work, still flying but only the transports and after a while not even those. I suffered conversion symptoms more and more frequently and even knowing that’s what it was didn’t help. Blurred vision. Tremors. All in my mind, but real as well.
The sidestep at work was a sidestep out of the fraternity as well. I still flew, but I wasn’t one of the jocks anymore, and though we remained friends there was always something missing. Maybe it was Sam. I was safer, though, which was what Sandy wanted. She managed to stay in the loop because she was still one of the wives, though she was always ‘Sam’s wife’ first and it got so that I began to feel it. I became a father to Tom Junior and though I never had any of my own I don’t regret that often. Tom was enough. He asked about his real dad a lot as a child, but as he grew older he asked less and less. He could have resented me, I suppose, as the new man stepping in to take his father’s place, but he never did, even as a teenager. Maybe he would have, if he’d had the chance to love and admire Sam as we did.
He visits me occasionally, even now. I think he’s sorry for how things turned out. I think we both are. Of course, neither of us has ever actually said it, just as we never talk about Sam anymore. There are things men say, and things they don’t, and sometimes we get it wrong.
***
“If I don’t fly it again, someone else will,” Sam had said. “You want to?”
It was a pretty mean way to make his point, especially for Sam, and I sensed in his question a judgement of my courage. Like finally he was admitting what he felt of me as a pilot. That I would never quite have the right stuff, or at least not as much of it as he did. But he was drunk. I was drunk.
He’d told me, again, about the lightning. He’d told me, again, about the sudden dark and how it felt like it wasn’t quite sky but a tunnel through it. Or a tunnel of it, like the sky was bent around him, a tube to pass through where no stars shone. And yet…
“I could see things. Out on the wings. On the nose. The canopy.”
“Things?”
He was seeing them again now, I thought. We were in Ratty’s of course, and his eyes were on the table in front of him but he was looking out of the Arrow. The jukebox was playing, people were yelling and laughing and dancing, but he was probably only hearing jet thrust and maybe the bubbling of fuel. Later he’d tell me he heard none of that, that the whole time in the dark was silent, like he wasn’t moving at all. Trapped in a long blink, he said, just himself and the Arrow. And yet, in that dark blink, there were things he could see. I don’t know what he put in his report. Part of me suspects he told them everything and they let him fly anyway.
“They were all over me. At first I thought the plane was falling apart, that I was seeing pieces of the Arrow lift up to tear free. But they were only flat at first. As they peeled from wherever they were on the fuselage they took on other shapes. Filled out. And it didn’t seem to matter none how fast we were going, they held right on and made shapes of themselves that shouldn’t have stayed at that speed. Fleshy clumps that spread whenever the lightning flashed, in sudden bursts just like the lightning that zigzagged over me. You seen creeper vines, Huckleberry? They were like that, like the fastest growing creeper vines you ever saw, only with these…these…masses, like…you know when you’ve got a bad cold, and you blow your nose or hawk something up and the stuff, it’s really thick? Like that. But they had other shapes, too. In the lightning. In the dark. They had arms and legs, I’m sure, and maybe even wings too, and they had too many of everything, and they could bend them into…into these angles like nothing I ever saw. Stuck all over the Arrow, like those things on a ship. Like limpets or barnacles. Only without the shells.”
“Sam—”
“And they were filled with holes.”
He took a drink then, but I’m not sure he knew he was doing it because he kept the glass tipped and still worked his mouth even when there was no more beer coming. Finally he put it down again and said, “I don’t know if they were holes. They might have been mouths. They might have been eyes.”
“Sam?”
“They might have been both. I think maybe they were both.”
I could only look at Sam as he stared at the table top. “Holes in holes in holes,” he said. “Holes filled with mouths. Filled with eyes. Eyes with holes in them.”
He glanced up then, pulled back into Ratty’s through what looked like his own force of will, and he said to me, “It hurt to look at them, Tom.” He massaged his head, fingers at his temples.
I took him home. It wasn’t far to drive but I took it slow, partly because I’d been drinking (though not much, not once Sam had started talking) and partly because Sam might have had more left to say. I thought it better he said it to me than to Sandy. She’d already called me once to talk about the things Sam said. In his sleep, mostly, but sometimes at odd moments. “He’s not here, Tom,” she said, “not all the time. He is, but he’s somewhere else, too, and when he’s there it’s not me he’s talking to. And what he says scares me.”
He didn’t say much on the drive home. He mostly sat swaying beside me, happy to be a passenger for a change, leaning forward in his seat with his arms on his thighs like he was back in the Arrow, nodding a little forwards, lurching back to overcompensate, and keeping his eyes on the dark road ahead of us.
“Hey, you remember the truck?”
I smiled and said, “I remember,” knowing he’d bring it up. He always did on this stretch of road. All pilots think they’re great drivers and we used to race each other out here. Sam won, more often than not, and when he didn’t I strongly suspect it was his choice not to. But one time we were so busy looking at each other, parallel, that we didn’t see the military truck coming right at us, bedded down with parts. Death, heading right our way. I saw it first and dropped back so Sam could nip in front. He almost nudged me, and the truck nearly crunched us both, but we survived, suffering only a scare neither of us admitted to, only laughed about.
Sam was looking sideways out of the window and I thought he was remembering. Which he was, only not what I thought.
“I think there were more of them I couldn’t see,” he said. “In the black. I think there was something bigger and I think the black might have been it, too big or too close or just everywhere all at once.”
“You’re kind of all over the place yourself,” I said.
It made him suddenly rigid, suddenly straight. Sitting to attention. “I’m a
damn good pilot,” he said. A statement of fact that was as close as he came to bragging, and only when he’d been drinking.
“You are.”
“Straight as an arrow,” he said. He made a zooming motion with one hand, a thrust forward like a jab to an unseen opponent, and laughed. The spluttering laugh of a drunk being childish. “Arrow,” he said.
“Yeah, you’re straight as they come.”
But soon he was rocking again with however the car moved, back and forth and side to side. He’d made a pillow of his jacket and kept trying to rest his head against the window.
“I think they were just babies,” he said.
“Right.”
“Or pieces of something bigger. Full of holes.”
“Full of holes, Sam. Okay.”
“They could see everything, Huckleberry. I think those eyes… I think…”
As he fell asleep or passed out he said, “I think they wanted to eat me.”
***
When they told me I had liver cancer the first thing I thought of was what Sam said back then. It wants to eat me, I thought. Hepatocellular carcinoma. At first I thought it was just stomach ache, but eventually I listened to Sandy who told me to get it checked out. We’d been separated a while by that point, but we were still friends. Well, we were friendly. Phone calls, Christmas cards. Anyway, I went through the surgery and treatment but it had spread to my gastrointestinal tract, or had originated there and spread to my liver. It doesn’t really matter which way around. I’m okay with it now because it feels like I’ve lived too much of my life from the outside. I remember the early days pretty well, and I can see the end coming, but everything in between is on a separate piece of paper somebody took away. There’s a big gap where I lived for a while, where my life went sideways. We always think there’s something else going on around us we’re not quite part of, friends having babies, friends dying, and before you know it your own beginning has an end and that’s it, it all happened when you weren’t paying attention. Twice now I’ve been told I have six months left, and there was a kind of relief the first time, seeing the truck coming at you instead of being surprised by it, and I lived those months well, fully aware for what felt like the first time. But it’s like my body doesn’t know when to quit. Maybe I’ve bailed out on too many things already and this time I’m not allowed. The crunch is coming, though.
Until then I’ve got plenty to think about.
When they rolled out the X-15 in ’58 I thought of the Arrow and its lightning stick and its sideways roll into black. The X-15 looked nothing like the Arrow but it could reach 280,000 feet, taking a pilot out of the atmosphere right to the edge of space. Not sideways, but up. Still, I wondered what they might see there. And for every ‘Spam in a can’ rocket project after that, Sputnik, the Apollo missions, I thought of those holes in the dark Sam said he saw looking at him. I remember speeding towards that fiery ruin of his crash and feeling its heat wash over us, smelling the smoke. A thick black plume of it leaned in the angle of his descent, a trail of fumes like a dark tunnel from the sky. And maybe that’s what it was because those things, the ones Sam talked about? They flew in it. They followed its path up and away and fell, spiralling down to earth as if struck. Some were spread across every available surface of the Arrow, coils of flesh wrapped around it, bodies flattened into thick fluids that held them in place, clutching underneath the fuselage at whatever they could find of the landing gear until it flipped, rolled, exploded and they were cast aside with the fiery wreckage. Limp rags of meat, hanging limbs, wings torn or flapping in flames.
This was what we sped towards in the jeep. There was a heavy thump, the smash of a headlamp, then something folded up onto the hood and rolled at the windshield. A loud crack from that and whatever had hit us was finally tossed away. Not before we’d seen the things that dangled from its segmented body, though. The loose sheets of skin. The ropey lengths of flesh.
Sam was right, there was something about what you saw that made your mind hurt, like you were looking at pain that could travel through your eyes to your brain. Looking at them, you felt yourself…going. I don’t know where. There was less of you, somehow. I saw them first when the Arrow began its spin, long angled limbs like fleshy lightning running across the aircraft seeking grip or suction. I had the binoculars, remember. But close up they were even worse.
Hobday brought the jeep around in a sudden squealing stop but none of us got out. Even when we saw Sam, a staggering man of fire, miraculously emerge from the smoke, we remained seated. We could only stare. Sam slapped at his body, but not at the flames, twisting and turning. Part of his helmet was gone, the front smashed away, and he was screaming and yelling in pain and panic. A lot of his words were lost to the chaos around him but I pieced a few together, then and later, often in dreams and drunken half-dozes where I remember better. “They’re coming after me!” is what I thought he screamed, but I don’t think so now.
When Sam came out, they were attached to him as they had been the jet. I’ve come to believe they were the reason he survived as long as he did. That they shielded him from the impact and the flames somehow. He slapped and pulled to get them off, and one of them, the one settled over his face, spread a single membrane wing. A raised flag that Sam tore away before falling to his knees. One of the medics got close to him but came to such an abrupt stop when he saw the things on Sam that he fell on his ass, kicking his feet to scramble backwards from where Sam struggled with something at his head. I like to think it was what remained of the helmet, I try to think that, but I don’t suppose that’s really how it was. Then he collapsed forwards, arms and legs spread. A fallen star.
For long moments he still moved – parts of him writhed and fluttered, pulled and stretched – and then blasts of foam obscured everything as the fire crew tackled the blaze, washing away what they could from where Sam lay. He was already dead by then. I could tell. Not because of the limp way his body moved beneath their hoses, or because the things leeched onto him began to withdraw, but because I felt it. Like a change in pressure. And I was glad. Seeing him ricochet on his feet, pulling at his body, hearing him scream, hearing what he said… I’m glad he died.
The things that spread away from him began to pop and pool. Some of them seemed to inflate, bubbling with air like isolated lung-sacs. Others spewed these long ropes that lay like the wet lengths of a mop head. A few of them burst. I saw one of the medics stamping on them, jumping on the bodies, crazy-dancing on the things, twisting, grinding the empty skins into the ground. He slipped at one point, landing hard, but he got right back up again to mash what was left under his boots.
I’ve wondered many times since that day if Sam didn’t put the Arrow in a spin himself. That he nosed down deliberately to kill the things coming out from the black space with him. If so, it worked.
Sam? It worked.
None of us there that day ever spoke about what we saw, and it wasn’t because of anything we signed. A bad psych evaluation got you kicked off the programme quicker than failing eyesight, but it wasn’t that either. In time, I think a lot of the others came to doubt what they’d seen anyway, and you can’t blame them for that. The brain has a wonderful coping mechanism like that. A sort of mental ejector seat. But me, I think of Sam’s last days all the time now that I’m living mine.
Sam tells me the dark is coming, and every day it seems I see some truth of it. I see him, too, sometimes. In my peripheral vision. He’ll be right there beside me until I turn to look, a fluke moment that lets me see him out of the corner of my eye, and then he’s just the smell of chemicals and cooked meat.
Corner of my eye. I’d never thought how odd that was until just now. An eye with angles to look from.
Anyway, sometimes Sam’s here for me to see, and it hurts to look at him. His face is full of holes, all of them watching. Porous judgement waiting to be filled with what’s left of me. Sometimes he’s wearing the helmet but that’s no better. It reflects my face back, distorted, a
nd I hear what he said that day in the fire. Not “They’re coming after me,” I don’t think he said that anymore. “They’re coming out of me.” That’s what I think he said.
They’re coming out of me.
What if looking at them put them inside? I don’t want to go like that.
When Tommy Junior used to ask about his daddy, I told him he flew too close to heaven and God saw him. Maybe it was something like that, only I don’t think it was God who saw. I think it was something else. Something made of holes.
So now I’ll go back. I’ll return to base. Somewhere in the desert, anyway. Some wide open place where there can be nothing either side of me. Where I can take care of things under a vast blue sky which I’ll make black, but only briefly. A plume of smoke headstone for the wind to take as I burn the holes that might be mouths, might be eyes. Holes within holes.
Eating me up, and seeing me from the inside.
***
This is Ray’s fourth appearance in Interzone (his usual haunt is our sister magazine Black Static) and he has another story due soon in Crimewave 13: Bad Light. His work has been published in various other magazines and anthologies, and most recently republished in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 8 and Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror. His collection – Probably Monsters – is available now from ChiZine Publications, and by the time you read this, a novella – ‘Within the Wind, Beneath the Snow’ – will be available from Snowbooks. Ray lives in Wales with his partner Jess.
Interzone #266 - September-October 2016 Page 9
