Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories (12 page)

  He always kept the points sharp. It was like the bite of a snake. He snapped back his hand with a gasp of pain. The point was jammed under a nail. It was imbedded in raw, tender flesh. He cried out in fury and pain. He pulled at the pencil with his other hand. The point flew out and jabbed into his palm. He couldn't get rid of the pencil, it kept dragging over his hand. He pulled at it and it made black, jagged lines on his skin. It tore the skin open.

  He heaved the pencil across the room. It bounced on the wall. It seemed to jump as it fell on the eraser. It rolled over and was still.

  He lost his balance. The chair fell back with a rush. His head banged sharply against the floorboards. His out clutched hand grabbed at the window sill. Tiny splinters flashed into his skin like invisible needles. He howled in deathly fear. He kicked his legs. The mid-term papers showered down over him like the beating wings of insane bird flocks.

  The chair snapped up again on its springs. The heavy wheels rolled over his raw, bloody hands. He drew them back with a shriek. He reared a leg and kicked the chair over violently. It crashed on the side against the mantelpiece. The wheels spun and chattered like a swarm of furious insects.

  He jumped up. He lost his balance and fell again, crashing against the window sill. The curtains fell on him like a python. The rods snapped. They flew down and struck him across the scalp. He felt warm blood trickle across his forehead. He thrashed about on the floor. The curtains seemed to writhe around him like serpents. He screamed again. He tore at them wildly. His eyes were terror-stricken.

  He threw them off and lurched up suddenly, staggering around for balance. The pain in his hands assailed him. He looked at them. They were like raw butcher meat, skin hanging down in shreds. He had to bandage them. He turned toward the bathroom.

  At his first step the rug slid from under him, the rug he had kicked aside. He felt himself rush through the air. He reached down his hands instinctively to block the fall.

  The white pain made his body leap. One finger snapped. Splinters shot into his raw fingers, he felt a burning pain in one ankle.

  He tried to scramble up but the floor was like ice under him. He was deadly silent. His heart thudded in his chest. He tried to rise again. He fell, hissing with pain.

  The bookshelf loomed over him. He cried out and flung up an arm. The case came crashing down on him. The top shelf drove into his skull. Black waves dashed over him, a sharp blade of pain drove into his head. Books showered over him. He rolled on his side with a groan. He tried to crawl out from underneath. He shoved the books aside weakly and they fell open. He felt the page edges slicing into his fingers like razor blades.

  The pain cleared his head. He sat up and hurled the books aside. He kicked the bookcase back against the wall. The back fell off it and it crashed down.

  He rose up, the room spinning before his eyes. He staggered into the wall, tried to hold on. The wall shifted under his hands it seemed. He couldn't hold on. He slipped to his knees, pushed up again.

  "Bandage myself," he muttered hoarsely.

  The words filled his brain. He staggered up through the quivering dining room, into the bathroom.

  He stopped. No! Get out of the house! He knew it was not his will that brought him in there.

  He tried to turn but he slipped on the tiles and cracked his elbow against the edge of the bathtub. A shooting pain barbed into his upper arm. The arm went numb. He sprawled on the floor, writhing in pain. The walls clouded; they welled around him like a blank shroud.

  He sat up, breath tearing at his throat. He pushed himself up with a gasp. His arm shot out, he pulled open the cabinet door. It flew open against his cheek, tearing a jagged rip in the soft flesh.

  His head snapped back. The crack in the ceiling looked like a wide idiot smile on a blank, white face. He lowered his head, whimpering in fright. He tried to back away.

  His hand reached out. For iodine, for gauze!-his mind cried.

  His hand came out with the razor.

  It flopped in his hand like a new caught fish. His other hand reached in. For iodine, for gauze!-shrieked his mind.

  His hand came out with dental floss. It flooded out of the tube like an endless white worm. It coiled around his throat and shoulders. It choked him.

  The long shiny blade slipped from its sheath.

  He could not stop his hand. It drew the razor heavily across his chest. It slit open the shirt. It sliced a valley through his chest. Blood spurted out.

  He tried to hurl away the razor. It stuck to his hand. It slashed at him, at his arms and hands and legs and body.

  At his throat.

  A scream of utter horror flooded from his lips. He ran from the bathroom, staggering wildly into the living room.

  "Sally!" he screamed, "Sally, Sally, Sally…"

  The razor touched his throat. The room went black. Pain. Life ebbing away into the night. Silence over all the world.

  The next day Dr. Morton came.

  He called the police.

  And later the coroner wrote in his report:

Died of self-inflicted wounds.

7 - DISAPPEARING ACT

These entries are from a school notebook which was found two weeks ago in a Brooklyn candy store. Next to it on the counter was a half finished cup of coffee. The owner of the store said no one had been there for three hours prior to the time he first noticed the book.

Saturday morning early

  I shouldn't be writing this. What if Mary found it? Then what? The end, that's what, five years out the window.

  But I have to put it down. I've been writing too long. There's no peace unless I put things on paper. I have to get them out and simplify my mind. But it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complicated.

  Thinking back through the months.

  Where did it start? An argument of course. There must have been a thousand of them since we married. And always the same one, that's the horror.

  Money.

  "It's not a question of confidence in your writing," Mary will say. "It's a question of bills and are we or aren't we going to pay them?"

  "Bills for what?" I'll say. "For necessities? No. For things we don't even need."

  "Don't need!" And off we go. God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? The television set, the refrigerator, the washer-none of them paid for yet. And the bed she wants…

  But despite all, I-I with wide-eyed idiocy keep making it even worse.

  Why did I have to storm out of the apartment that first time? We'd argued, sure, but we'd argued before. Vanity, that's all. After seven years-
seven!
-of writing I've made only $316 from it. And I'm still working nights at the lousy part-time typing job. And Mary has to keep working at the same place with me. Lord knows she has a perfect right to doubt. A perfect right to keep insisting I take that full-time job Jim keeps offering me on his magazine.

  All up to me. An admission of lack, a right move and everything would be solved. No more night work. Mary could stay home the way she wants to, the way she should. The right move, that's all.

  So, I've been making the wrong one. God, it makes me sick.

  Me, going out with Mike. Both of us glassy-eyed imbeciles meeting Jean and Sally. For months now, pushing aside the obvious knowledge that we were being fools. Losing ourselves in a new experience. Playing the ass to perfection.

  And, last night, both of us married men, going with them to their club apartment and…

  Can't I say it? Am I afraid, too weak? Fool!

  Adulterer.

  How can things get so mixed up? I love Mary. Very much. And yet, even loving her, I did this thing.

  And to make it all even more complicated, I enjoyed it. Jean is sweet and understanding, passionate, a sort of symbol of lost things. It was wonderful. I can't say it wasn't.

  But how can wrong be wonderful? How can cruelty be exhilarating? It's all perverse, it's jumbled and confused and enraging.

Saturday afternoon

  She's forgiven me, thank God. I'll never see Jean again. Everything will be all right.

  This morning I went and sat on the bed and Mary woke up. She stared up at me, then looked at the clock. She'd been crying.

  "Where have you been?" she asked in that thin little girl's voice she gets when she's scared.

  "With Mike," I told her. "We drank and talked all night."

  She stared a second more. Then she took my hand slowly and pressed it against her cheek.

  "I'm sorry," she said and tears came to her eyes.

  I had to put my head next to hers so she wouldn't see my face. "Oh, Mary," I said. "I'm sorry too."

  I'll never tell her. She means too much to me. I
can't
lose her.

Saturday night

  We went down to Mandel's Furniture Mart this afternoon and got a new bed.

  "We can't afford it, honey," Mary said. "Never mind," I said. "You know how lumpy the old one is. I want my baby to sleep in style."

  She kissed my cheek happily. She bounced on the bed like an excited kid. "Oh, feel how soft!" she said.

  Everything is all right. Everything except the new batch of' bills in today's mail. Everything except for my latest story which won't get started. Everything except for my novel which has bounced five times. Burney House
has
to take it. They've held it long enough. I'm counting on it. Things are coming to a head with my writing. With everything. More and more I get the feeling that I'm a wound-up spring.

  Well, Mary's all right.

Sunday night

  More trouble. Another argument. I don't even know what it was about. She's sulking. I'm burning. I can't write when I'm upset. She knows that.

  I feel like calling Jean. At least
she
was interested in my writing. I feel like saying the hell with everything. Getting drunk, jumping off a bridge, something. No wonder babies are happy. Life is simple for them. Some hunger, some cold, a little fear of darkness. That's all. Why bother growing up? Life gets too complicated.

  Mary just called me for supper. I don't feel like eating. I don't even feel like staying in the house. Maybe I'll call up Jean later. Just to say hello.

Monday morning

  Damn, damn, damn!

  Not only to hold the book for over three months. That's not bad enough, oh no! They had to spill coffee all over the manuscript and send me a
printed
rejection slip to boot. I could kill them! I wonder if they think they know what they're doing?

  Mary saw the slip. "Well, what
now?"
she said disgustedly.

  "Now?" I said. I tried not to explode.

  "Still think you can write?" she said.

  I exploded. "Oh, they're the last judge and jury, aren't they?" I raged. "They're the final word on my writing aren't they?"

  "You've been writing seven years," she said. "Nothing's happened."

  "And I'll write seven more," I said. "A hundred, a
thousand!"

  "You won't take that job on Jim's magazine?"

  "No, I will not."

  "You said you would if the book failed."

  "I
have
a job," I said, "and you have a job and that's the way it is and that's the way it's going to stay."

  "It's not the way
I'm
going to stay!" she snapped.

  She may leave me. Who cares! I'm sick of it all anyway. Bills, bills. Writing, writing. Failures, failures,
failures!
And little old life dribbling on, building up its beautiful, brain-bursting complexities like an idiot with blocks.

  You! Who run the world, who spin the universe. If there's anybody listening to me, make the world simpler! I don't believe in anything but I'd give…
anything.
If only…

  Oh, what's the use? I don't care anymore.

  I'm calling Jean tonight.

Monday afternoon

  I just went down to call up Jean about Saturday night. Mary is going to her sister's house that night. She hasn't mentioned me going with her so
I'm
certainly not going to mention it.

  I called Jean last night but the switchboard operator at the Club Stanley said she was out. I figured I'd be able to reach her today at her office.

  So I went to the corner candy store to look up the number. I probably should have memorized it by now. I've called her enough. But somehow, I never bothered. What the hell, there are always telephone books.