Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales

by L. A. Lewis

  I forgot that Mary had long been dead, and thought that she lay beside me in our old room at Hampstead. She was asleep, to judge by her quietness, and I had just awakened; but she lay very still in my arms. I bent my head forward and tried to touch her face with my lips - but it eluded me - and, with an effort, I opened my eyes. I was back in my own bed at ‘Heronay’, and, of course, there was no face on the pillow beside me.

  Yet I did indeed hold something in my arms down under the bedclothes - something that felt like the body of a woman, but it was very cold and still. I slid my feet out to the floor sideways without turning back the sheet.

  The missing bunch of keys lay on my pedestal cupboard, but I shall not belatedly explore that upper room. I know too well what it contains.

  Haunted Air

  "WELL, BLAKE, we can’t do your stuff yet. What about another “tonic’ while we wait?’

  Pitchmann, air-record breaker and taxi-pilot of international repute, pushed his empty tankard over the counter and strolled to the window, where he stood looking glumly through rain-blurred glass across the sodden aerodrome.

  Violent gusts howled in paroxysms about the angles of the Club House, and the wind-stocking above the hangars stood out horizontally, threshing like a mad thing.

  ‘Okay,’ said the press photographer laconically. ‘My squeak, I think. Two more cans, please, steward.’

  Pitchmann moved back to the bar.

  ‘Bloody nuisance hanging about this god-forsaken dive for a shot of that blasted crash,’ he complained. ‘Why the hell didn’t Carr pick some tin-pot shopkeeper for a passenger instead of an M.P? Your rag would have given ’em a three-line par and let me out of this “picnic”.’

  Blake shrugged and took a pull at his beer. He knew Pitchmann as well as anyone could claim to know him, having been his passenger on many rush jobs across Europe, and he knew’ when the big pilot expected an answer - which was not often.

  Pitchmann half emptied his tankard at a gulp and swept the four other occupants of the room with a contemptuous glance, favouring the Club Instructor with a nod as nearly cordial as the latter might care to believe.

  ‘Better join us, Jacobs,’ he remarked acidly, with an imperious gesture to the barman. You seem to think it’s too breezy for your nestful of stiffs to take the air - so why waste good beer-time?’

  Jacobs hitched his chair forward and murmured, 'Thanks. A pink gin,’ endeavouring to sound as casual as he could. He hated Pitchmann’s intolerant grey eyes and air of conscious superiority, but knew that his directors expected tact from him - perhaps even more than flying ability. He was not obliged to agree with all Pitchmann’s opinions, but it would not do to offend the fellow.

  'Shot if I’m going up solo in this gale, anyway,’ said young Remington, who, as an owner-pilot with private means, held aces in no particular esteem.

  Pitchmann pointedly ignored him, rousing the boy to quick anger

  ‘Call it what you like,’ he went on heatedly, ‘it was taking a chance yesterday in this sort of damned weather that killed Carr, threw his passenger clean out of the machine, and brought you vultures up here to get photos of his wreckage.’ His second remark drew the badger Pitchmann accorded him a supercilious stare.

  'That poor mutt!’ he replied witheringly. ‘He was for the high jump all his flying career. Windy as hell. Fair weather pilot from A to Z. That’s the only way he lasted so long. I’ve seen him turn down local joy-rides on account of a bit of ground mist when Imperials were getting through from Le Bourget in pea-soup stuff. You blokes who play at flying for a hobby can go up and sun yourselves on fine days like damned butterflies, but the professional has to fly it anything - anything,’ he repeated loudly, ‘otherwise aviation ceases to be a business.’ He turned his back on Remington and glanced at Jacobs for confirmation.

  The latter nodded judicially.

  ‘That’s true up to a point,’ he agreed, ‘but we all have our different jobs. Mine’s training pupils at present, and I’m not expected to risk their necks and the machines in these conditions.’ He glanced out of the window and added, ‘Incidentally, the sun is breaking through a bit, though the wind’s increasing.’

  ‘Come on, Blake,’ said Pitchmann, slamming down his tankard. ‘It’s visibility we want. Damn the wind! Let’s get your plates exposed, and we can be back in Town by evening!’

  He stooped to pick up his gloves and turned impatiently to the press photographer, who was finishing his drink. ‘Get a jerk on, man. I want to be away.’

  The door slammed after them.

  ‘He’s rather wonderful, don’t you think?’ observed the only lady member present, looking up from the pages of Air Events, and emerging from daydreams of a celebrated woman pilot’s latest exploit. ‘I mean,’ she continued diffidently as nobody vouchsafed a reply, ‘a man has to be big really big in himself - to talk quite so - so ruthlessly, to - to lay down the law like Captain Pitchmann.’

  ‘Damn good pilot, anyway,’ said Jacobs, breaking an awkward silence. The barman was heard to grunt noncommittally. Young Remington lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring ceilingwards.

  ‘You may think he’s wonderful, Mrs. Conyer,’ he volunteered, ‘I think he’s a disease. After all, “De Martins nil nisi bonum.” I didn’t know Carr personally, but that was no way to talk of a bloke who’s just passed out...’

  The roar of an engine drowned the rest of his sentence and Pitchmann’s 'plane flashed past one of the windows, staggering drunkenly in the tremendous gusts that assailed it. As the noise dwindled the fourth occupant of the lounge broke in for the first time.

  ‘Thanks, laddie. I did know Carr personally. We were, in fact, very old friends. But it’s no good arguing with a man like Pitchmann. A good pilot, yes - very good - but absolutely without sentiment, so one can’t expect any consideration from him.’ He paused and stared after the disappearing aircraft.

  ‘Pitchmann,’ he resumed thoughtfully, ‘accused Carr of being “windy”, and implied that it was a lack of technique in bad conditions that killed him. I know how he was killed, and, if you like, I will tell you at the risk of straining your credulity... Do any of you believe in ghosts?’ he wound up with apparent irrelevance.

  ‘Suggesting a supernatural explanation of the crash?’ Jacobs countered. ‘Because, if so, Beckett, you’re wrong. Carr was caught in a bad “bump" - a “sinker" - and thrown out of control. I know the air pockets there, and they’re fierce enough even in a normal breeze.

  ‘Haven’t you seen that Air Ministry notice advising pilots not to cross the Ridgeway in a high wind under two thousand feet? They have quite a few spots black-listed that way now - one near “Gib" for instance - another up the Forth. Queer things, bumps.’

  First of all, said Beckett, settling back with the persistence of a born raconteur and totally disregarding Jacobs’ remark, ‘I must say in fairness to Carr that he was not a fair-weather pilot. When I was his observer in France, in 1916, we were up more than a few times in this sort of thing’ - he waved a hand towards the window - ‘and in a type of machine that would fall to bits on you for two pins. Carr never flunked his job then, but as he explained to me when I met him years later in civil flying, he didn’t see the force of taking unreasonable risks in peace time for the sake of publicity. He preferred knocking up a modest three or four hundred a year in his own way to under taking spectacular flights for big money which he might not live to enjoy. Hence his reputation as quoted by Pitchmann and his failure to get work with the more progressive concerns. He and Pitchmann often used to meet at Croydon, and the great man never missed a chance of using Carr as a foil for his own prowess. He would watch Carr take a passenger to a thousand feet for a couple of loops, and then go up and cut the air all shapes, at a quarter the height. Carr could have done it as well, and had done later in the War, when he was on “scouts”, but people didn’t know that, and his caution lost him a lot of trade, not that he seemed to care. I guess his wife knocked the personal ambition out of h
im - but that’s by the way.

  ‘Now, I’m going to tell you something about Carr that I’ll bet he never admitted to a soul except myself; but first I must digress to explain what helped me to believe his story. You look interested, Mrs. Conyer, and if you two blokes don't want to listen, you can play darts. We shan’t fly yet, anyway.

  ‘Well, I had a brother who was a pilot in the East, after the War, operating from a hill station - frontier stuff you know - and he was killed in much the same way as poor old Carr. One night, after the rains, a pretty extensive landslide occurred in his district, a few

  thousand tons of soil falling on a native settlement, and my brother was sent up to survey the damage. When he failed to return after a due interval, two machines went to look for him. Of these, only one returned, the pilot reporting that his companion had first sighted my brother’s plane, badly smashed up among some rocks, and had dived down ostensibly for a closer investigation. Seeing that there was no possible landing-place at hand, the reporting pilot had kept his altitude and circled round waiting for the other to climb up again when his survey had finished. To his astonishment the machine below suddenly began to perform the most crazy aerobatics, throwing several loops and rolls at a very low altitude and finally flying for some distance on its back, from which position it presently nosedived with great violence into the rocks, and burst into flames. After debating for some time the advisability of investigating both crashes more closely, he concluded that they might have been caused by abnormal wind eddies, and that it would be wiser to send a land party. This the C.O. decided to do, and after considerable difficulty the crashes were brought in, and the usual court enquiry held. Both pilots had evidently been killed instantly, but from my brother's machine, which had not fired, it was deduced that there had been no structural failure, and the verdict was “Crashed out of control, owing to exceptional atmospheric phenomena associated with the contours”. Within a few weeks three more pilots were killed at or near the same spot, after which it was mapped out as a prohibited area, and the matter officially closed. It was only when I met an officer from the same squadron on leave during the following year that I heard about the native version as related by a fanatical old tribesman, who had made a pilgrimage to the aerodrome especially to implore the C.O. to stop flying over the landslide, and had talked a lot of guff about “Things which are Enemies of Man and Beast Creation" and the Earth having "Given Outlet to That which the Prophet had Sealed Down”. Gun we called it then,’ said Beckett quietly. 'I'm not so sure now.’

  It was a tribute to the man’s personality and to the conviction in his voice that no ward of interruption was spoken as he slowly filled his pipe.

  ‘As you, no doubt, are aware,’ he went on presently, ‘there was i landslide on this saddle called the Ridgeway some ten days ago, her what you may not know is that Carr was the first pilot to fly over r after the occurrence. He read the account of it in a newspaper, and having his joy-ride ’plane parked in a field relatively near to the scene he elected to go up and view the subsidence from the air. It is of interest that his machine was an Avro three-seater, convertible for dual control by removing the middle seat, flooring and all, so as to expose the second rudder-bar and joystick socket. Carr had beat giving instruction to some local resident the previous evening, and he took the Avro over the Ridgeway, flying from the front seat, without bothering to remove the dual controls. Well, he found the place without difficulty - a big brown gash in the green hillside, as he described it, but nothing much as a spectacle. Beyond blocking a short length of road in the valley, the fallen earth seemed to have done little harm, and he was about to turn, back to his field when he caught sight of something moving in the air, between his ’plane and the ground, which looked extremely odd, and as he told me, gave him an unaccountable feeling of goose flesh, even before he saw what sort of thing it was.

  ‘Apart from its extraordinary shade of pulsating, unnatural green, the object was quite evidently not a bird and he might momentarily have dubbed it a grotesque toy balloon, like the flying pigs they shoot down at the Hendon Pageant, but for the fact that it was so obviously - and somehow horribly - alive. Carr described it as resembling a monstrous monkey, clambering with incredible speed up an invisible rope. It appeared to be wriggling vertically upwards, and as he watched it in fascinated wonder his lower wing passed over and hid it from view. He banked steeply to the left, failed to see it, and as quickly whipped into a right-hand turn - but the green thing had vanished. He made a complete circle, still without success, and finally, the air being calm, took his hands from the controls and half raised himself in his seat, the better to see over the engine cowling. As he did so, the machine’s nose rose abruptly, and he had to grab the joystick in a hurry to avoid a stall.

  ‘Carr told me that he was too intent on watching for the reappearance of the weird object to realise at once how queerly the aeroplane had behaved. It was so rigged that, without ballast in the rear cockpit, the nose should have dropped. As soon as this dawned on him, he again released the stick, which, to his utter amazement, began to move rapidly from side to side, the Avro wallowing in unison with it, as the ailerons took effect. So pronounced and regular was the movement that it could only be caused by someone moving the dual stick in the other cockpit - but he had taken off solo!

  ‘Carr said that several things happened to his brain during the next few seconds, but in what order he could not remember. Ill-defined fear numbed his faculties, so that he could do nothing but stare stupidly at the shifting controls, but at the same time a corner of his mind, working with crystal clarity, was aware that the green thing had somehow got into the machine with him, that it was definitely alive, though equally definitely not human, and, worst of all, that it was intelligently operating stick and rudder! He felt his hair crawling under his tightly strapped helmet, and dared not look behind him.

  ‘Presently he heard the engine open out, and dully realised that the throttle lever was correspondingly moving forward while, at the same time, the joystick came back slowly towards him, and the Avro began to climb. He seems at this period to have fallen into a sort of coma, in which state his physical senses were blanked out, and only some deep recess of his brain continued to record intuitive impressions. He knew that, whatever creature was riding behind him, it was age-old, and somehow belonged to the air. He also knew that it had been long imprisoned, and was exultant at release, while he understood, too, that there was no novelty in this nightmare situation.

  ‘Either it had happened before, or, his subconscious self had contained a fore-knowledge of it, hitherto mercifully concealed... His next physical impression was seeing the needle of the altimeter standing at five thousand feet, and simultaneously feeling the ’plane nose down into a power dive, engine at full throttle, and stick pressing the dashboard. For a few seconds it held this course, then swept up and over in a perfect loop. As the stick came back into the pit of

  his stomach he clutched it feebly - childishly - and attempted to force it away, but it was locked as though in a vice. While the sunlit vista of Earth whirled over his head, the stick did go forward again, but Carr knew he had not moved it. An instant later, the Avro executed a flick roll stalled, and fell into a spin.

  ‘Carr said that as fast as the thought flashed into his brain, that this was the end, it was followed by a positive assurance that his strange captor would let him live - at least for a time. He felt, in some fashion, that this same horror had befallen other pilots whose deaths had never been satisfactorily accounted for, and that, becoming demented with fear, they had roused contemptuous anger in these green things, and so courted instant death. He, by showing no physical reaction, had whetted the appetite of this monstrosity for a cat-and-mouse game. He said he felt like a raw pupil receiving a lesson in aerobatics from a masterly instructor.

  ‘Carr said the culmination of nausea was reached when the thing touched him for the first time (I gather it forced other assignations on him, though of these
he did not speak). Powerless to make physical resistance, he felt a pad-like extremity brush his cheek clammily, and expected a stranglehold, but realised with extreme repugnance, that the touch was in the nature of a petting. The viscous paw passed smoothly over his face, covering his eyes, where it lingered caressingly, obscuring his vision. Then, to his profound disgust, he felt a gelatinous mouth pressed against his own! The shudder that passed through him at the contact somehow restored his muscular control, and, uttering a word of loathing, he again clutched the controls, dimly aware that the green thing was crawling sinuously over the side to the port lower plane, where it wreathed itself about the gap strut and stood regarding him. Carr described it as resembling a human or ape in build, having a flexible trunk, four limbs ending in flat, webbed pads, and a grotesquely tiny wet head, with round, mouse-like ears. Its mouth was a yellow slit, and its eyes lidless, and opaque. It was nude and hairless, but of indeterminate sex, as it possessed the facility of altering its shape in any direction, like those glutinous, transparent things one finds in ponds. When he at last brought himself to look directly at it, the creature grinned at him, and hopped along the wing, where it gripped an aileron and shook it up and down, causing the machine to rock. Next, it stretched two of its rubber-like limbs the full length of the fuselage, to seize rudder and elevators, which it proceeded to operate by direct pressure against Carr’s efforts with the controls. From this unique position it once more put the plane through all its imaginable paces. During the whole performance its face radiated a sort of perverse glee, reminding Carr, through the mist of horror that wrapped him, of a mischievous child playing with a toy. Finally it slithered back along the wing, and gazed intently and for a long time into Carr’s face. Carr said that its telepathic influence was strongest at that time. He knew as well as if it had spoken aloud what it was thinking. There was a damnable, triumphant possessiveness in its eyes which told him that he now belonged to the green thing for all Eternity. It recalled, he said, the way some women look at a man when they have him in their power I suppose he spoke from experience. Finally the creature released its hold, and drifted down into the abyss of air, still staring up at him with an expression of gloating ownership.