Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

“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 trouble. “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. “Señorita, 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.