Flight or Fright

by Stephen King

  Back in California, Ryan resolved to convert his impractical degree into a career. He trawled the gallery scene and started picking up contacts for private art collectors and stumbled into the hothouse sub-culture of pre-Columbian artifact freaks. He did shopping trips from Mexico to Tierra Del Fuego, cutting out layers of middle-men until he had a dozen dot-com millionaires in his client list. Half the antiquities in South American museums were fake, and archaeologists worked in secret to keep looters at bay. The UN and US Customs had cracked several rings that operated around Palo Alto and Stanford, but Ryan didn’t move in show-off circles. His clients didn’t flash their grave robbery trophies at charity galas, and he didn’t trade in the crap you’d see in National Geographic.

  The Xorocua lived in the high alpine valleys of the Cordillera de Talamanca, less than two hundred miles from the capitol, and yet a day’s hike from the nearest navigable road. They were initially believed to be a virgin Stone Age tribe until 1950, when they were documented by a Smithsonian photographer.

  His photographs of the Xorocua harvest ritual told a tragic story of prior contact buried in the bizarre ceremony. A man in a crude bull costume rampaged around the huts of the village all night until just before dawn, when a procession of masked guardian spirits arrived to defeat the bull by spitting blood upon it until it weakened and died. The guardians in their carven masks drank corn liquor mixed with various poisons to summon into their bellies the diablitos, who repaid in kind the torments and genocide that decimated their tribe and drove the survivors into the most remote cloud-forests of Talamanca.

  The Xorocua were primitive by any standard, having struggled too long and hard with basic survival to devise any elaborate cultural treasures. Their greeting to strangers was a formalized plea for food. But the harvest festival masks in those photographs were a revelation.

  Each mask was “mouth-painted”—airbrushed using paint spat through a reed—in livid, smoldering colors and elaborate motifs more like runes than abstract motifs. Despite their hostile rejection of the outside world, the Xorocua masks inspired a collectors’ frenzy in the 70s. By 1982, the last Xorocua had died from influenza. But the neighboring tribes still feared their masks.

  With no analog anywhere in the region, they were stranger and more elaborate and fearsome than any Maya or Aztec deities, almost Polynesian in their fusion of human, insect, floral and animal features, and imbued with a feral malevolence that made the most severe Gothic gargoyles look like Care Bears.

  From what he could find in print, he gathered they were a nasty variant on the Latin American fairies, known as duendes. The word came from the Spanish duenos—or owners—because they were the true owners of any habitat they shared with humans. But the neighboring tribes’ Spanish name for them, and for the Xorocua themselves—was more fitting for spirits never quite seen, but keenly feared—diablitos, or “little devils.”

  Ryan had scored some incredible Moche burial charms on a sweep through Colombia and Peru and successfully posted them to his drop contact in California. He flew to Panama City, drove a jeep into the Cordillera de Talamanca just to hike Cerro La Muerte and chill out. He didn’t expect to find any remnant of the Xorocua in the rudimentary museums and tourist traps in the nameless mountain villages, and he didn’t. Fakes and pastiche trash chiseled out of balsa wood and haphazardly airbrushed with acrylics by mestizo hillbillies who knew less about the Xorocua than Ryan’s dumbest clients.

  Ryan Rayburn III never got anywhere by forcing success. That way lay madness and ulcers; just ask Ryan II and Ryan I. He simply let good things gravitate to him, as they always had. An old blind woman outside a hut with a cooler full of blood-warm Fanta had made a strange gesture and coughed into her hand when he asked her granddaughter about the Xorocua. Coughed into her arthritic claw and opened it up and a red butterfly took flight from her hand.

  The girl played mute, but while he was drinking his third Fanta, Ryan poked around the compound. All the men were off hunting or logging, and nobody saw him except a naked boy whose testicles had yet to descend. The huts were huddled in an octagon around a well beside a waist-high soapstone idol, weathered and worn until its chiseled features were only vague dimples in the stone.

  Ryan nearly shouted and threw his soda in the air. It was a Xorocua village, or the revival of one, which was highly unlikely. Many tribes in the region buried their dead under their homes, then moved far away. The site of a tribal extinction would be like a stone age Chernobyl.

  The old blind woman appeared, then, and sold him the mask for two hundred dollars. That was what he would tell anyone who asked. He’d told himself the story enough times by now, that he almost believed it. What really happened was hardly the worst thing he’d ever done, and there was simply no point in reliving it.

  The mask was authentic. It looked like it weighed a hundred pounds, but was carved of some unidentified purple-black jungle softwood that weighed less than water. The paints were indigenous pigments; the deep indigo derived from azul mata, the pale, liquid gold extracted from onion skin, the fiery orange from achiote fruit, the lurid violet extracted from the glands of an endangered mollusk called munice. The unexpected splash of deeper, duller red on the inside of the mask looked less like an accident than a savage signature, and would probably only increase its value.

  He had a standing buyer on the line—two, actually, and fiercely jealous competitors. When his plane touched down at LAX, he could unload the mask for fifty thousand, maybe double that, if he held it long enough for discreetly seeded rumors to spark a bidding war.

  The exhausted purser at the gate held the door open for him without checking his papers. Stepping out onto the tarmac was like walking into a whirlwind of animal breath. The jungle closed in on all sides of the runway like walls of emerald fire. The Pura Vida Air 727 idled as the last straggling passengers hustled up the rolling stairway and into the hatch.

  The flight was just over half full. About fifty passengers, two-thirds American. Most of them had already turned out their lights and were trying to go to sleep, huddled under thin nylon blankets against recycled paper pillows.

  He groaned as he found his seat. 11A, by the window, just aft of the wing, beside a longhaired Caucasian beardo and a buxom Asian lady snuggling and tinkering with the faulty fans set into the ceiling. Perking up alarmingly as they got up to let him squeeze into the window seat, the man introduced himself as Dan, his wife Lori. “Need something to read?” he asked, holding out a paperback. “I wrote it myself.”

  “Quit bothering people, honey,” his wife murmured. Ryan shook his head and spread out in the empty seats across the aisle.

  The stewardess began the preflight emergency pantomime, gesturing to masks and escape hatches in time with the crackling recording in Spanish, when the last passenger stumbled down the narrow aisle and nearly sat on his bag.

  Ryan grabbed his bag out of the shadow of the large descending ass just in time. He started to say, “Watch where you’re going, idiot,” when he saw the white cane gripped in the fat old woman’s hand.

  Ryan’s whole body went rigid. He pushed back against the window, and if he’d been seated next to an escape hatch, he might’ve grabbed the latch and popped it and leapt out onto the wing.

  He threw up a defensive arm and tried to squeeze out of the seat. The blind woman stumbled against the steward who had helped her to the seat, then rebounded off the arm of 11C and threw out an arm to catch herself before she fell into his arms.

  At second glance, his seatmate was just a girl, maybe thirteen, with a long horsy face and terrible acne scars. Her eyes bulged out of her head like unscrewed lightbulbs. Her pupils rolled up to stare through the ceiling, half obscured by heavy, sleepy lids. Her white cane snapped out to jab his ankles.

  He took a second to catch his breath, longer to collect his thoughts. With so many empty seats, why on earth would they put her next to him? A young American man traveling alone sitting next to a blind foreign girl was asking for troub
le. “Aren’t there a lot of other seats on the plane?”

  The steward returned to the tail of the aisle to help lipsync the tail end of the safety instructions.

  Perhaps deaf as well as blind—or perhaps she didn’t speak Spanish—the girl lowered herself into 11D and sat with her knees tightly together and a handwoven native bag trapped in her arms.

  The plane bumbled backwards and then taxied onto the runway with a woozy, rolling speed that made Ryan wonder who was flying the plane. Maybe the blind girl could go to the cockpit and help.

  The turbines were winding up when Ryan noticed the girl hadn’t buckled her seatbelt. “Se–orita, your belt should be fastened …”

  She rocked slightly but didn’t respond. A tiny crucifix and a string of glow-in-the-dark plastic rosary beads clutched in her hands, frequently rising up to kiss her thick, chapped lips.

  The stewardess was buckled in at the front. Apparently, it was his responsibility. For duty and humanity, he thought, as he reached over to fasten the belt. “Let me help you …”

  The girl’s hands trapped his in a sweaty, trembling vise. She cried out as if he’d woken her from a sound sleep to find herself groped, empty eyes staring as if she could see his face floating in her perpetual darkness.

  Wrenching his hands free, he tried to calm her down without touching her again, but it was no use. She didn’t seem to hear or understand him, and she was already in a panic over the flight and being pawed by some strange man in the middle of it. Feeling vaguely ashamed, he looked around for help, but no one seemed to notice. The escalating howl of the engines drowned out her screaming, and then the drunken lurch of acceleration flattened them into their seats.

  When the landing gear folded up and the plane leveled off, she went back to her silent prayer. Ryan turned his face to the wall and wadded his sweatshirt into a pillow. Outside, the blinking red light on the wing danced and bled as streaks of rain raced across the glass. The little coastal city was engulfed in tufts of fog like giant kites snarled in the trees. Only a few lost lights that might have been ships at sea testified that the city he’d just escaped was still down there.

  Ryan was a seasoned traveler. He could sleep anywhere, under any circumstances. He clenched his legs tight around the duffel bag on the floor and tried to empty his mind. It took a while, though, because every time he felt himself sliding into slumber, the blind girl coughed loudly into her fist.

  His mind kept circling back around to the mask. The customs agent had started coughing up blood at the sight of it, but let him go. Was that just some kind of crazy coincidence? The Xorocua were wiped out by disease, so it figured their folklore would invent some kind of magical spirits for protection or revenge, but fat fucking lot of good it did them …They were long gone, their weird, sad little religion just an anthro text footnote that fascinated millionaires who needed bloodthirsty pagan gods for poker partners. Were the masks some kind of vector for spreading a virus? That would explain something, if he had gotten sick, but aside from the usual tropical rashes and maladies, he felt fine. He didn’t believe in curses, unless you counted poverty.

  They had leveled off at 30,000 feet when Ryan decided he wasn’t going to sleep, and decided to work on getting drunk. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands for a while. Maybe he should try to apologize to the blind girl, or better yet, move to another seat. He turned to size her up and found himself eye to eye with the Xorocua mask.

  She was wearing it. The whites of her empty eyes glinted through the slits cut into the beetling, jaguar-mottled brow. Every plane of the angular face was painted a different animal texture, as if to tie all the life of the jungle into its vengeful visage. But now, on the blind girl’s face, it came to life.

  The stylized, branching horns jutting from the jawline and temples glowed cobalt blue, like gas-jet flames. The interlaced fangs in the snarling mouth slid apart like the tumblers of a lock and a torrent of black, rancid blood jetted out over the curled lips to splash down the front of his shirt.

  He jumped up and smashed his head into the luggage compartment, fell back into his seat. The blood all over him was cold and sticky and alive with twitching, scuttling things that disappeared under his clothing before he could tear them off. His screams went unheard by the other passengers. The blind girl’s bony arms barred his escape. She pressed closer, still coughing up gouts of infested blood and he was drenched and drowning in it when he threw out his hands to pry the mask off her face.

  The mask came off with a sound like rusty nails worming out of rotten wood. It took her face off with it and she crushed him into the wall, her cold, slimy cheekbone hard against his chest.

  He might’ve screamed when he woke up. His face was stuck to the cold window. Every other part of his body was crawling with sweat. He was groggy as if he’d popped a couple Ambien on top of a few shots of tequila.

  Slowly, deliberately, he turned and looked at the blind girl. She sat bolt-upright in her seat, her head thrown back against the unyielding headrest, her steady breath like plumbing gurgling past a ferocious blockage.

  Her traytable was unfolded, and a half-empty Styrofoam cup rested on it beside a foil bag with some kind of pickled fruit spilling out of it, and her plastic rosary beads, glowing like plutonium in the blue murk. Beverage service had come and gone while he slept.

  Her dress was homespun cotton, richly embroidered with garish butterflies and birds. As he studied her, fighting the urge to pinch himself, she was wracked with a string of wet, red choking coughs. Fuck this noise, he thought, and grabbed his bag. Gingerly clearing the junk from her traytable, he folded it against the back of 10C and undid his seatbelt.

  The cabin was hotter than the fucking Yucatan. His inner ears throbbed as they always did when he flew, but they felt like he was deep underwater, and not skipping over the upper atmosphere. The only light came from the spotty fiber-optic strips along the aisle, and a couple spotlights over passengers nodding over laptops or reading Kindles with iPod plugs in their ears.

  Moving one limb at a time with total concentration, he levered himself out of his seat and threw a leg over the girl’s knees to plant his foot in the aisle. It was a good plan, and he was careful as hell, but his foot slipped on something and he skidded into the splits with a stifled yelp.

  The girl’s knees jabbed his ass. He braced himself for the shrieking and batting fists, but they never came. The girl coughed so hard he felt the wet force of her expelled breath through his shirt. Fighting panic, he lurched over her into the aisle, dragging his duffel bag and swinging it over the slumbering head of the passenger in 10C, a fat mother with a mustache and a double armload of squirming kids in her lap.

  He must’ve been out for a couple hours. The plane bounced off roiling pockets of turbulence somewhere over the lightless Mexican interior. The aisle was clear, except for a couple of cups rolling in loopy circles with the rise and fall of the plane. The stewardess was nowhere in sight.

  Ryan hurried down the aisle, trying not to bump into passengers’ dangling arms and legs. The last row of seats before the restroom was empty, and he made for them like a seasick drunk.

  The plane dipped alarmingly just as he reached the seats and fell into them. His heart raced, muscles jittered with spurts of misspent adrenaline. His bag felt weightless as he dropped it into the window seat. Holy shit, but he’d got himself worked up. He needed a drink. Maybe the stewardess would let him buy a bottle of hard stuff. Hell, maybe she’d share it with him. He deserved something good, after everything he’d been through.

  He cradled the duffel bag against his hip. It was weightless because it was empty.

  Shock galvanized him. Ripping the zipper open, he plunged his hand into the bag and found himself looking at his grabbing hand again, when it popped out the ragged hole in the bottom of the bag. Only a couple pairs of rolled-up tube socks and some boxer shorts were still in the bag, and they were wet, clinging to the walls of the bag in a slimy black paste. The hole was not just
a rip in the double-walled nylon. It was a gaping circular fucking hole, like the material had been dissolved …or chewed up.

  “Fuck!” he seethed through gritted teeth, looking up the aisle at the scattered yard sale of his possessions trailing all the way back to his old seat. He staggered down the aisle, scooping up slimy piles of clothing. Finally, his hand caught something with heft to it that he snatched up with a grateful whimper, but it turned out to be his shaving kit.

  He felt eyes tracking him and the unmistakable sense of someone laughing at his predicament, but every face was turned away, tucked into its neighbor’s shoulder or tilted back, mouth agape.

  The whine of the engines seemed to subside, the plane to rock laterally and the cups in the aisle tumbled towards the nose. Were they descending already?

  Finally, he reached his old seat. Dan and Lori were fast asleep. The carpet was spongy with pooled fluid all around the blind girl in 11D. She must have thrown up, he thought with distaste, or wet herself. His mask was not anywhere in the aisle, so it must have fallen out under his seat when he made his escape. From there, it could have rolled away with the turbulence, could be anywhere in the goddamned plane. There was nothing else to do, but go looking.

  He started to kneel beside the blind girl. The plane tilted nose-down and sent him sprawling to the floor. He threw his hand out to save his head and caught an armrest in the eye. He fell to the deck and laughed at his clumsiness when something stabbed him.

  A bolt of pure agony was driven by his falling weight into his right leg, just under his right kneecap, until it popped through the tender flesh between the thongs of tendon and muscle at the back of his knee.

  It hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced, until he tried to straighten his leg, and whatever had intruded into the delicate mechanism of his knee snapped inside him, and then pain became his whole, wide world.

  Howling, he crumpled on the deck, hugging his impaled knee to his chest. He screamed over and over, but it didn’t dawn on him right away how strange it was that, for all his screaming, nobody on the plane had reacted at all.