The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (44 page)

He clicked the receiver a few times and listened to what he knew was a dead line. Then he slowly replaced the phone and massaged his stomach as he stared at the picture of his wife on the desk. The cold, alabaster beauty of the woman. The perfection that had no warmth whatsoever. He put on his overcoat and headed out of the office. The pain deep inside was clutching, pulling, biting at him. He didn’t bother to tell his secretary where he was going and when she saw his face, she didn’t ask.

He took a cab to Grand Central, and waited forty minutes for the train to Westport. There would be a scene with Jane, but he had to suffer this. He could handle it best by silence. She would scream at him, but he’d take a drink and go to bed...

The conductor grinned at him as he went down the aisle collecting tickets “You’re going home early tonight, huh, Mr. Williams?”

Williams nodded, then closed his eyes tiredly.

“Feelin’ okay?” the conductor asked.

“Yeah,” Williams said. “Feeling fine.”

The conductor announced, “Stamford, next stop. Stamford,” as he disappeared into the other car. Williams pulled down the window shade, let the seat recline a notch and closed his eyes again. “Stamford, next stop.” The voice was growing faint and indistinct. “Stamford.” And then another voice fused with it.

“Willoughby,” the other voice said. “Willoughby, next stop.”

Williams felt a warmth on his face as if the sun were trying to get through to him. He released the blind and guided it slowly up toward the top of the window There was the town outside. There was the summer afternoon. The band, the children, the laughing men and women, the organ-grinder, the village square, the whole thing. It lay there like a beautiful tableau.

“Willoughby,” the old conductor said, coming into the car.

Williams jumped to his feet. “Willoughby?” he asked excitedly.

“That’s right,” the conductor said.

“Then that’s where I get off. Willoughby. That’s my station.”

“Yes, sir. That’s your station. Willoughby.”

Williams walked through the old wood and velvet car to the platform and down the steps to the summer afternoon that waited for him outside.

“Hi, Mr. Williams,” a boy said, carrying a fishing pole.

“Hi, Mr. Williams,” another freckle-faced kid called, as he rode past on a bicycle.

Williams looked from one to the other. “Hi, boys,” he said. “Catch some big ones today, huh? I think tomorrow I may join you.”

The first boy laughed. “Plenty of room and lots of fish.” He continued on, waving as he went.

A man on a wagon waved. “Hi, Mr. Williams. Welcome.”

“Thank you,” Gart answered. “Thank you. I’m...I’m glad to be here.”

He headed toward the bandstand and the village square. People greeted him and welcomed him. The organ-grinder wiggled a finger at him and made the monkey bow and take off his cap. Williams laughed, feeling a repose, a peace, a serenity he could never remember before. He paused in front of a store window and looked at the huge grandfather clock that was on display. Its pendulum went back and forth and the clock was like everything else around him. It was solid and had meaning and a function and it was unhurried, and steady. Williams slowly loosened his tie and felt good about everything. The pendulum continued to swing back and forth, back and forth.

The trainman’s lamp swung back and forth in an orange arc, casting light and shadow on the snow underfoot and illuminating the overcoated body of Gart Williams who lay face up, snow on his rumpled clothes, on lips, eyebrows, and hair. A sheriff’s deputy motioned with his lantern for the ambulance to pull up closer.

“Just jumped off the train, did he?” the trainman asked.

The conductor nodded. “Shouted something about Willoughby, ran out to the platform and that’s the last I seen him.” He looked questioningly at the deputy. “Died instantly did he? That what I heard you say?”

The deputy nodded. The ambulance backed slowly through the snow toward where Gart Williams’s body was being placed on a stretcher. “It appears so,” the deputy said. “We’ll take him into town for an autopsy. Funeral parlor there sent the ambulance.”

“Poor fellah,” the trainman clucked. “Poor, poor fellah.”

The ambulance stopped, its rear doors wide open. Four men carefully lifted Gart Williams’s body and put it into the rear of the ornately scrolled black vehicle. The driver gunned the engine very slowly and moved the ambulance gingerly through the snow toward the highway. The trainman’s lantern briefly illuminated the lettering on the rear doors.

“Willoughby and Son, Funeral Home” the lettering read. And then the ambulance disappeared into the night and, for a brief moment, its headlights could be seen probing the snow-filled darkness, as it reached the highway and turned toward town. The train started up again. Twenty-one minutes behind schedule, it headed toward Westport, Connecticut, its next stop.

Mr. Gart Williams had climbed on a world that went by too fast and then had reached out trying to grasp at a respite from torment. In a sense he had merely jumped off this world. He did not feel the snow melting over his dead flesh as the ambulance sped through the night. Quite the contrary, the sun was very warm in the little village and he’d taken off his coat and tie. He was with a group of boys heading toward a stream where the trout were and he was laughing because it was summer and there was peace. And this was a place where a man could live his life full measure. This was Willoughby.

The Odyssey of Flight 33

They don’t talk about the flight much anymore—at least the pros don’t. On occasion a vastly theoretical article will appear in a Sunday supplement or mention will be made in a book on air disasters but, by and large, the world’s day-to-day catastrophes are sufficient in scope and number to take even the loss of a giant airliner off the agenda.

But with the pros it’s different. It isn’t that other flight talk takes precedence. It’s simply that Flight 33, and what did or didn’t happen to it, carries a chill. Even now, just eleven months later, you never hear it mentioned in the Ops Rooms, where the pilots chain-smoke and watch the weather reports, nor in the control towers, when the tense and tired men who talk the planes down get a respite for a quick cup of coffee and a smoke.

There are other cases of disappearing aircraft on record, of course. There was Amelia Earhart, who took off from New Guinea for the mid-Pacific island of Howland, and was never heard from again. There was the less well-known, but equally tragic case of the two U.S. Navy AD6 Sky Raiders, on a flight for Fallon, Nevada, who neither arrived nor left a clue as to what happened to them. There was the mysterious case of the two British airliners, the Star Ariel and a sister ship the Star Tiger. Tiger vanished over that sea of weeds called Sargasso which lies in the Atlantic off the Bahamas.

Thirteen days later Ariel followed her into oblivion. No trace of either plane was ever found.

But Flight 33was different. It was a jet airliner. Beautiful, graceful, full of incredible power, as safe as any plane could be. And it simply had no business disappearing. It was too fine an aircraft. And whatever yanked it out of the skies was a power that couldn’t be reckoned with on a design board or in an engineer’s manual. That’s why you rarely hear of it where pilots and crews congregate.

Call it superstition, vestiges of black magic. Call it that strange and unspoken mysticism that somehow, incongruously, is to be found among the highly scientific body of men who fight gravity for a living.

But whatever you call it, don’t ever ask a captain, a first officer or any crew member to talk about the Trans-Ocean flight that disappeared between London and New York on a quiet, otherwise uneventful June afternoon They’ll pretend they didn’t hear you.

Trans-Ocean 33 was airborne at eight-thirty AM, and left a fog-shrouded London International Airport under normal and routine circumstances. It was marshmallow and drifting whip cream until the 707 reached 21,000 feet and broke into that incredibly clear blue sky, the vast universe that hangs perpetually and majestically above the crowded, dingy world.

Three hours later the aircraft was a thousand miles from the Atlantic seaboard. The crew and the one hundred and three passengers aboard had enjoyed a pleasant, unruffled flight. They were on course and on time and estimated arrival at Idlewild, New York, within a couple of hours.

Inside the cockpit Captain William Farver, a ruddy-faced, forty-five-year-old pilot with several hundred thousand hours of flying time, made a visual sweep of the instrument panel, a ritual he performed every thirty or forty minutes. His practiced glance took in the altimeter, the Mach meter, the rate-of-climb indicator, the Ram air indicator, and two dozen other instruments whose dials, levers, and tabs were as familiar to him as shirt buttons to the average male. At his right side sat the first officer, Joe Craig, tall, youngish, blond. Craig had a tendency to quick anger, but he was a good pilot with know-how and a mind not a half a beat from that of the captain. Farver looked over his shoulder toward the navigator.

“Hey, Magellan,” he said, using the sobriquet common to navigators, “how about a flight progress report?”

“Coming up, Skipper,” Hatch, the navigator, answered him. “We’ll be about four minutes behind flight plan at thirty degrees west.”

Second Officer Wyatt, who sat at the captain’s left, removed his earphones. “Captain,” Wyatt said. “Gander wants to know if you intend an altitude change after we pass thirty west?”

“Advise Gander negative,” Farver responded.

Hatch took a sheet of paper off a clipboard and handed it across to Purcell, the Flight Engineer, who scanned it briefly and gave it to Farver. Farver checked it, then grinned around the tiny, instrument-packed cubbyhole.

“Gentlemen,” he said happily, “you’ll be pleased to know that thanks to the quality of this aircraft, the fine weather and my brilliant flying, we’ll hit Idlewild on schedule if our speed holds up.” He handed the report over his shoulder to Wyatt, the second officer. “Send it in, Wyatt,” he ordered.

Wyatt put on his earphones, Kicked a switch on the complex radio equipment and spoke into the mike. “Shannon, Shannon,” he said over the whistling jet engines, “Copy Gander...Trans Ocean Flight 33, position 50 north, 30 west, time 14-OH-3.. .flight level 35,000. Estimating 52 north, 40 west at 14-31. Estimating Idlewild 18-30. Endurance (by this he meant fuel) 7-9-5-6-OH. Temperature minus 47. Acknowledge, Shannon.” He listened for a moment, heard the muffled voice at the other end, then flicked the switch. “Report received, Skipper,” he announced.

Through the flight-deck door in the rear of the compartment, Jane Braden, the senior stewardess, entered, carrying her one hundred and twelve pounds like a Rockette. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was pulled back severely in a bun, but she still looked like a Rockette and was built, in the memorable words of Flight Engineer Purcell, overheard in a bar one evening, “like a steel-girdered, two-funneled ship of the line on her inaugural sailing day.” Jane leaned against the navigator’s chair and Craig spoke to her without turning.

“How we doin’ back there, Janie?”

“Your passengers are highly content. But on behalf of the stewardesses, we would like to respectfully request that we get to New York as soon as possible.” She smiled and the smile was bright and beautiful, much like the rest of her. “One’s going to the opera,” she continued, “three have heavy dates, and the fourth is available to any honorable and single, male crew member.”

There was laughter at this. Purcell half rose in his seat to announce his qualifications in a piping voice that always made him sound like a bosun with a built-in claghorn. Farver, laughing with the rest of them, suddenly broke off and stared out into space.

Like many pilots, somewhere along the line the captain had developed a sixth sense for anything amiss. It could be a slightly laboring engine that skipped once in a thousand revolutions. It could be a stodgy rudder that an engineer wouldn’t pick up with a microscope—but a pilot could feel. Or it could be a sensation of something...something indefinable...something without a precedent that would suddenly blanket him with a packed-ice feeling of impending trouble. And, at thirty-five thousand feet in a six-hundred-miles-an-hour airplane, trouble wore a thousand masks, a million disguises. It could creep out of a crevice at any point along the one-hundred-and-forty-six-foot fuselage of a 707. Farver had that feeling.