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one weary from three consecutive days of red-eye business flights starting in New York and ending in Kansas City, Charlene Hartwig had still managed to squeeze in an hour to visit her favorite Native American store in south KC before catching a flight home later to Houston, Texas. She was elated she had. According to Charlene’s old friend and shop manager Jessica Alexander, the weird-looking piece she’d purchased had come from rural upstate Massachusetts. Native American artifacts from that part of the country were rare, so the stone carving was a valued addition to Charlene’s collection.
While the odd-looking piece lacked the intricacy of many Native American artifacts, it made up for that in other subtle ways that intrigued her. Carved from dense, olive green rock speckled with gold flakes, the smooth, greasy-feeling object suggested great age; seemingly, it had been handled by countless hands, thus explaining the smoothness of the image.
Adding to the object’s mystery was its strange appearance. Roughly humanoid in shape from the waist up, the torso was thick and uneven. Lumps pitted like the surface of a prune sprouted from unlikely places on its back, sides, and abdomen. True arms were absent. A squat, misshapen head crouched directly on the torso like melted candle wax. Subtle spatial oddities left her feeling disoriented. She found herself looking at the thing several times to make sure she hadn’t imagined what she’d seen.
From the waist down, any humanoid resemblance vanished, and diseased fantasy began. Eight short, bulbous legs sprouted from the pelvis, splaying wide. Terminating in soft, fleshy-looking pads, they provided excellent octopoid balance.
Charlene’s mingled feelings toward the weird object nearly made her pass it by. But her unease was offset by a stronger, near-hypnotic attraction that led to her purchase. With the thing safely stowed in her travel bag, she raced northward in her rental car toward MCI airport in north Kansas City, fifty miles distant.
Later, having checked her bags and passed through security without being stopped (a rarety; she was usually hounded and groped mercilessly by horny male guards who abused their authority), she placed her carry-on bag and purse on the conveyor belt to be x-rayed. As she approached the metal detector, she glanced left at the screen just as her bag passed beneath the unit. To her surprise, the artifact went undetected. Less dense objects such as her hair dryer and brush displayed shadowy gray images.
A few minutes later after stowing her carry-on, she slumped exhausted into a cozy window seat in first-class, and closed her eyes. Within a few moments, she had neared the borderland of sleep, intending to rest through the entire flight. Shortly after, she sensed another passenger plopping into the seat to her right, but didn’t open her eyes. After wiggling around a bit, the stranger settled in.
Minutes later, she regained consciousness briefly during take-off, and then she remembered nothing more until the plane banked left unexpectedly during the flight.
The turn wasn’t what had stirred her from sleep; it was the intense nausea that had briefly accompanied it. Her unease had come and gone so quickly that she’d barely had time to register its presence before she sank into sleep once again.
Disturbed by the plane’s lurching final landing approach, Charlene opened drowsy, bloodshot eyes that felt as if they were living in a sand pit. Glancing through her window, she was shocked by the deepest azure sky she’d ever imagined. Stretching from horizon to horizon, it overwhelmed her. She glanced at her watch: 4:05 p.m. Far too early in the afternoon for the sky to be so dark.
Perhaps there’d been a storm, she thought. That might explain the odd-colored sky, and also why the plane had banked earlier. The flight crew had probably dodged a severe thunderstorm that had blossomed in their path.
But the other things she saw made no sense.
Hazy with distance, she noticed a huge body of water bordering the land below. Stretching from horizon to horizon, it seemed as endless as the Gulf of Mexico she’d often visited in her native Texas. Squinting, her eyes followed the lake’s shimmering surface into the distance and she noticed a hint of land, perhaps an island. Gasping, she thought she briefly saw fantastic eerie towers, geometric cubes, and needles rising into the sky. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. But the vision was gone, hidden by ground mist that had risen to meet the descending plane.
Oklahoma had no body of water that large, she knew. And the other things she’d thought she’d seen. . .
Her flight must have been rerouted. But where?
Tearing her gaze from the eerie sky, she glanced down and forward at the terminal, and found further confirmation of her concerns. She’d flown into Oklahoma City dozens of times previously, and the layout and building styles she saw below her now were not just wrong, but eerily wrong; they didn’t so much stand as crouch. The structures seemed almost—furtive, as if they were hiding something.
She’d planned on getting off the plane for a coffee and a magazine, but now had second thoughts. With her apprehension growing, she turned to the passenger beside her to ask if he knew where they’d been rerouted. But the middle-aged man appeared to be sleeping, and had his hat pulled low over his brow.
Sighing, she returned her attention to the window.
The street lights bordering the terminal were eerie, too. Their strange, elegant stalks and futuristic lights reminded her of the alien war ships in the movie War of the Worlds. At first she thought they were sodium lights. But if they were, the strange glow they emitted was of a color she’d never imagined. Perhaps it was the eerie azure sky that made them appear so.
They fascinated and terrified her.
Turning in her seat, she craned her neck sharply to watch them as long as possible, and then wished she hadn’t.
Just before they fell behind her field of vision, three of them flexed, bending toward the descending plane on their towering frames. Their glittering lights looked like searching, nightmarish eyes.
Charlene turned away and clasped her hands to her mouth . . . and then chuckled softly at her silliness. Surely, the supposed “movement” was due to distortion from the warped plexiglass bordering her window.
When the plane landed, the slight jar seemed to reassure her. Here at least, was something normal—something to be expected. The jet taxied down the runway, turned toward the terminal, rolled to a wing of one of the odd-looking structures, and came to a stop.
Having decided against disembarking the plane, Charlene turned her attention to the immediate area near the terminal.
At first, all seemed normal. Airline personnel scurried about in their uniforms. Some drove luggage carts or tankers, others walked about on foot.
Curious, she cast her gaze toward the terminal, and noted passengers riding a horizontal conveyor just outside the main building. Some had luggage in hand, others did not.
She was about to look away when something disturbed her. Squinting, she looked again. Distance made it difficult to be sure, but the faces of all the passengers on the conveyor seemed incomplete. And even viewed from this distance, the features looked bloated and gray.
Trembling anew, she glanced further to the left, and discovered other troubling things. None of the passengers disembarked at the terminal. All rode the conveyor to a destination that led to an open area far out on the tarmac. Hazy with distance, she thought she saw the foremost of the passengers riding the belt drop abruptly from sight, as if they’d fallen into some gaping pit. Adding to this unsettling suspicion, a blob of tarmac darkened abruptly, there.
Doubting, she rubbed her eyes and continued to watch.
Like lemmings, more passengers passively vanished into the gulf.
Then, she thought she saw a hazy, amorphous form reach up and snatch a person from the conveyor. While momentarily waving its squirming prize high above its writhing body, multiple appendages wriggled into sudden view from the blotch on the darkened tarmac, and fought with the first. A brief, fierce struggle ensued, and the victim was torn in half. For a moment, a long lumpy string sagged from the severed halves, and then parted.
Charlene recoiled from the window and clasped both hands to her mouth to stifle a scream. Despite the intervening distance and concealing, distorting mist, she was certain of what she had witnessed.
Unable to resist, she glanced nervously outside again. Gazing forward closer to the jet, she noticed that a man and woman had just descended the steps. After walking about a third of the way to the terminal, the man pointed at the passengers on the conveyor and turned to the woman, placing his hands on her shoulders to halt her.
A short, agitated conversation ensued. The man gestured frantically back at the plane, and tugged at the woman’s arm. After a moment’s hesitation, both ran toward the jet. But they were quickly intercepted and surrounded by several security people.
Terrified, the man swung his briefcase at one of them, knocking the man to the ground. During the ensuing confusion, he burst through the gap and ran toward the plane.
The woman tried to follow but was wrestled to the ground, buried beneath a writhing heap that seemed to soften and melt, even as Charlene watched. Surely, poor light and fog were responsible for the unsettling things she thought she’d seen.
But lighting and mist could not explain what happened next.
With the woman subdued, one burly security figure rose to his feet, turned toward the fleeing man, and straightened his arm in that direction.
Charlene clapped a hand over her mouth in suspense; she was sure he intended to shoot the fleeing passenger.
Instead, he lengthened his arm nearly forty feet like a rubber band. As the ghastly member elongated toward the victim, the hand on its end expanded into a flexible, tent-like flap of skin. Once positioned over the frantic man, it settled on him like a living, clinging blanket. After a few seconds of violent struggle during which the rubber arm swayed back-and-forth like a fleshy jumping rope, the imprisoned passenger slumped to the tarmac, and was still.
Charlene bit the skin between her thumb and index finger to avoid screaming. Suddenly, she sensed that it was very important that she didn’t.
She’d barely regained control of her fright before an attendant reached over and drew down the blind on her window, startling her further. Pausing in the aisle seconds later, the swarthy young man said, “Sorry about that, m’am. Sometimes, those blinds don’t always function properly.”
She forced a smile she didn’t feel and said, “Thanks. I’m dead tired after working all week, and need the sleep, anyway.” Charlene thought of mentioning what she’d seen outside her window, but again, something cautioned her against it.
The attendant lingered, fixing her with intense, searching, dark gray eyes.
Suddenly, she sensed that this was a life-and-death test. If she failed it—wavered even slightly, she might end up worse off than the man she’d just seen (captured? killed?) outside.
Eventually the attendant seemed satisfied, and moved off toward the front of the cabin.
Terrified, Charlene slid lower in her seat.
Then, the slouched male passenger next to her mumbled from under his hat, “Good thing you didn’t panic and tell him what you saw. If you had, you’d have been worse off than anything you witnessed out there. I’d have done what I could. But here in this place against Them, you, I, and the others on this plane would stand little chance.” Without giving Charlene time to gather her startled thoughts and reply, he added darkly, “Miss Hartwig, when you fell asleep earlier on this flight, you unwittingly put us all in deadly danger.”
Nervous and unbalanced by what had already occurred, she managed to reply, “H—how did you know my name? Who are you? What business is it of yours?”
Tipping his hat back slightly with his right hand, he turned his head slightly, raising a finger to his lips. “Keep your voice down. There’s a good chance we’re still being watched.” Taking his sky blue eyes from Charlene, he swept them about the aircraft with such cautious precision that he looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “My name’s Dominic Jarrett,” he muttered behind one hand. “I’m a member of the Wilmarth Foundation—a small group having special interest in, ah, a certain group of antiquities.
“I got your name from the shopkeeper at the Native American store in KC. She was quite reluctant to give it, but thank God I convinced her. Took ten precious minutes of explanation to find out where you were headed. I nearly missed the flight.”
Pressing on, he said, “Let me be clear: I’m not pursuing you. I’m interested in the carved image you purchased. I got wind of its existence four months ago from the farmer who discovered it in his field and sold it. I’ve been desperately seeking it ever since. I lost the trail twice, but managed to pick it up again.”
Bewildered and upset by Dominic’s brash revelations, Charlene angrily asked, “So you wish to purchase it from me?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes. I’ll pay you far more than you are out for the thing just to get it safely hidden away before it does any worse damage than it already has.” Charlene was about to rebuff him when he added, “Are you by chance artistically inclined, Miss Hartwig?”
Taken aback by this sudden twist in the conversation, she stammered, “I—I’m an interior designer. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything,” he muttered. “The Great Old Ones have long used unsuspecting, sensitive, artistic people to open their locked and hidden gates. When you innocently purchased what you thought was a Native American carving, and later fell asleep on the plane, you opened one of those gates. I was the only one aboard who noticed.” Involuntarily, he shivered. “Passing through the gate was brief but horrible!” Swallowing a lump in his throat, he added, “Anyway, that carving is a crude image of one of the Great Old Ones. As such, it is imbued with deadly powers.”
For the next few minutes, Dominic frantically gave a brief encapsulation of the Great Old Ones and their dark history to Charlene.
Glaring at Dominic, she said, “And you expect me to believe something as—as absurd as all that?”
After a pause to find the right words, he said, “Okay. I’ll try another tack: Just where do you think this flight currently is, Miss Hartwig?”
Charlene’s forehead wrinkled, and her eyebrows drew down in concentration, “I—earlier, I was going to ask you if you had any idea where we’d been rerouted, but you were sleeping. While I was asleep, I felt the plane bank left, so—I think we’re somewhere in Tennessee. Maybe Memphis?”
Despite his earlier admonition to speak softly, he chuckled into one hand and said, “When Dorothy turned to her dog Toto in the movie The Wizard of Oz and said, ‘that she didn’t think they were in Kansas, anymore,’ they were far closer to home in Oz than this plane full of passengers is to earth, Miss Hartwig.” Again, he changed subjects, and nodded at the front of the plane. “Forget whatever disturbing things you saw outside earlier, and whatever unbelievable things I just revealed to you. Look at the name of the airline at the front of the cabin. Have you ever heard of such an airline, before?”
Charlene followed his gaze, and started when she saw the name. “Aldebaran Airlines? How? We boarded on . . .”
“Yes,” he whispered ominously. “Never heard of it, have you? And yet, Aldebaran does exist. It’s a star far outside our solar system.
“According to the Necronomicon and other ancient texts—all of which predate man’s existence on earth by geologic eons, Aldebaran is also home to one of the most powerful, dangerous entities among the Great Old Ones: Hastur the Unspeakable.” Pressing on, he said, “I know this all sounds fantastic, but you must believe me if we’re to have any chance of getting out of this, alive.
“The image you purchased is a crude likeness of none other than Hastur, himself. When you fell asleep, you opened the gateway to Aldebaran beside his home on the Lake of Hali. You are the one he craves, most. If you leave this plane of your own free will and set foot in his domain, we are all lost.” Fixing her with pleading eyes, he added, “Even if you disregard everything I’ve said about The Great Old Ones, remember the issue of Aldebaran Airlines.” Nodding cautiously toward the center of the cabin, he whispered, “Take a good look at the other passengers; they seem fully awake, but not one of them noticed when the plane banked left and went through Hastur’s gate earlier. Not one of them has noticed anything wrong, since. You and I are the only two aware. Hastur is toying with us for seeing through his elaborate ruse. And he’s toying specifically with you because it is you that he craves. Or rather, your mind.”
Despite the impossibility and scope of Dominic’s revelations, Charlene was now convinced. The things she’d witnessed dovetailed perfectly with many of the things he’d said. “W—we’re not the only ones who knew something was wrong,” she sighed, lowering her head. “There were two passengers that got off the plane, earlier, a—and . . .”
“. . . they won’t be coming back”, he finished darkly. She nodded her head frantically in agreement.
Ominously, he added, “You wouldn’t have witnessed whatever you saw, had your blind been lowered like everyone else’s. What airline do you know of that has automatic blinds that lower before landing? None. Your blind didn’t lower because Hastur wanted you to sample some of the ghastly horrors that lie ahead. That’s how confident he is of his trap.” Sweat had sprung from Dominic’s brow and trickled down his face in rivulets. Leaning uncomfortably close, he hissed, “Do you think you imagined all that? Keep this in mind: the horrid things you saw out there were done by Hastur’s paltry underlings. If he should come from his home on the island in the Lake of Hali and we can’t stop him, our deaths will be a thousand times more gruesome—hell without end, Miss Hartwig, for the Great Old Ones crave the soul as well as the body.”
Shocked, Charlene stared into his eyes, unable to speak. Chaotic thoughts tumbled through her mind. Swallowing hard, she grasped his coat urgently and asked, “Is there anything we can do?”
Reaching into the inner lining of his coat pocket, he withdrew two crude-looking six pointed stars carved of stone. “These are defensive talismans against the minions of the Great Old Ones and to a far lesser degree, against the Great Old Ones, Themselves.
“You have been chosen by Hastur, Miss Hartwig. That cannot be undone. From now on, you must carry one of these on your person at all times.” He handed the cool, weighty pieces to Charlene. A pleasant tingling sensation tickled her palm. Speechless, she placed them in her purse. “The star stones from Mnar are not infallible,” he explained. “Corrupted, completely human foes are not affected by them; they may try to wrest your talismans away. Once stripped of a star stone’s protection, you are defenseless against inhuman underlings of the Great Old Ones, and the Great Old Ones, also.” Exhaling, he sat back and placed a hand on his forehead in thought. Then he snapped his fingers. “You could increase the odds dramatically in your favor by having one of the stones surgically implanted beneath your skin, making the talisman more difficult to remove.” Seeing her shock at the thought of such a thing, he added, “Is a minor scar worse than facing what you saw earlier outside this plane, or far worse, and losing?”
Shuddering, she agreed. “What do I need to do?”
“Stay on the plane. I think you have to be willing to leave of your own free will and set foot in Hastur’s domain before the point of no return is reached.
“But I could be wrong. Lesser entities in his service might be able to drag you from the plane, completing the process. That is why I gave you the star stones.” With reluctance, he said, “Of course, there is another possibility.”
Charlene swallowed the lump in her throat and asked, “W—what is that?”
“It might well be that Hastur will take matters into his own hands. If he chooses to come here, there’s little we can do. Against him, the star stones will be like fighting Goliath with a spitball.”
Any remaining doubts as to whether underlings of The Great Old Ones were aboard the aircraft were shattered in the following minutes. Twice, members of the cabin crew advanced down the aisle toward the frightened pair, and only the star stones saved them from a grisly confrontation. Incredibly, none of the other passengers noticed a thing.
After the second encounter, Charlene looked at her watch and then at Dominic. “We can’t just sit here,” she said. “There must be something we can do.”
Dominic shook his head in denial and sighed, “I’m fresh out of ideas.”
“But this is nothing more than a stalemate,” Charlene argued.
“I know. But it’s better than walking out there to certain doom. My hope is that Hastur realizes you have no intention of leaving the plane, and tires of the game.”
“After what you told me about the Great Old Ones, I don’t think they’re short on patience,” Charlene said. “Rather than free us, Hastur may starve everyone off the plane.”
“If that’s all he does, be thankful,” Dominic said, shivering.
For a few minutes, they sat in silence. Then, Charlene grabbed the blind on her window, and raised it.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Seeing if anything’s changed outside,” she said with a tremor in her voice. At first, all in that hellish place seemed normal. But just as she was about to glance away, she noticed something in the distance over the Lake of Hali. “Oh, God, look!” she said, clutching Dominic’s arm.
Leaning over her lap and pressing his face to the plexiglass next to hers, they watched in horror as a blob of distant blackness hovered in the sky. Then with shocking speed, the darkness rocketed toward them, expanding and eating the sky with a blackness beyond black.
“Hastur comes,” he said, choking on the foul name as his face turned ashen. “One way or another, our plight will soon end.”
Charlene cowered in her seat, wishing she were dead and thus free of what the horror might do. Transfixed, they watched, hypnotized, while Hastur eclipsed the sky overhead with its bloated, hellish form.
Despite that its body was blacker than pitch, they were able to distinguish some of its hellish features. Shaped roughly like a gigantic coconut, its torso swarmed with countless lashing tentacles. To their horror, the tip of each ended not with a suction cup, but with a wickedly sharp-looking object that looked like a long, thin knife.
“So part of the rumors are true,” Dominic hissed, flinging his body back from the window in terror.
Despite her own fright, Charlene turned to him and asked, “W—what do you mean?”
Gathering himself, he said, “Decades ago in the rural northeastern US—I don’t recall exactly where, a horror fiction author rented a cabin for a year to do some writing. Some months later he was found dead by unknown but ghastly means. H—he had—tiny holes drilled in his skull. When the coroner removed the skullcap during autopsy, the brain was missing; it had been siphoned out through the holes in his skull.
“Investigators discovered some odd notes written by the author scattered about his cabin. At first, they thought them the product of a deranged mind. But then, they found the old books that contained information about the Great Old Ones, and Hastur in particular. Eventually, those books found their way to the Wilmarth Foundation, and me.
“Now that I’ve seen Hastur, myself, I’m sure he killed the unfortunate writer, and sucked out his brain while the poor fellow was still alive.”
Charlene stared at Dominic in wide-eyed horror.
Glancing about wildly with sweat pouring from his face, he said, “I have to do something. In a few minutes, maybe less, Hastur will cut this plane open like a knife slicing through whipped cream, a—and . . .” Suddenly, he screamed, leapt to his feet, yanked a star stone from his pocket, and ran down the aisle toward the front of the cabin, brandishing it in front of him.
One of Hastur’s underlings in human guise blocked his way to the exit. Thinking quickly, Dominic thrust the talisman at its head. Screeching an unearthly howl, the thing staggered back, jerking its hands to its face—hands with fingers that, in the heat of battle, lost their human guise and turned into wormlike tentacles. Stinking green mist seeped from the gash eaten in the thing’s now-flaccid head, clogging the air. The thing slumped to the floor with a basso howl that threatened to crack the jet’s windows. Quickly, its torso devolved into a gelid, quivering lump. Additional writhing, amorphous appendages ripped through its uniform and grasped feebly at Dominic’s trousers just before the horror wheezed once like a tire going flat, and then was still.
Tearing his trousers free of the clinging appendages, Dominic hooted and danced about like a victorious madman. Then he ran to the open exit door, and stumbled down the outside steps. Worried, Charlene turned and pressed her face to the window. On the tarmac below, Dominic stumbled drunkenly in terror, averting his eyes and thrusting the star stone at the pitch black thing hovering overhead like a gigantic jellyfish.
For a few moments, Hastur floated, motionless.
Charlene’s hopes began to rise that the talisman would be enough to defeat the horror, and somehow free them.
Then without warning, a flurry of tentacles tipped with sharp, cutting tips whipped out and down in a narrowing V, lancing into her companion’s head before he could move. Blood spurted immediately. Shortly after, a handful of tentacles loosed their grip, dragging with them long, stringy lumps of whitish gray tissue; others by the score remained firmly attached, sucking greedily.
“No!” Charlene screamed insanely. “Noooooo!” Leaping to her feet, she frantically clawed open the overhead baggage compartment, and clasped her carry-on. Spinning, she flung it into the aisle and pounced upon it with such frenzy that she bumped her head on a seat. Dizzy but determined, she unzipped the bag and dumped its contents. Roaring like an animal, she swept unwanted contents aside and tore the wrapping paper from the carving.
Like zombies, other passengers continued pleasant conversations, listened to music, or slept on unaware.
Leaping to her feet, Charlene raced down the aisle. Clutching the carving in front of her, she brandished it at two of Hastur’s underlings, who shrank back in terror. Evil though they were, it was certain death to touch a powerful talisman made by their master.
Stepping over a stinking pool of ooze—all that was left of the underling that Dominic had dispatched earlier, she staggered through the hatch to the top of the steps just in time to see what had befallen her companion.
Not content merely to dine upon its brash victim, Hastur intended to ingest Dominic completely, keeping his soul eternally alive. Lugging the limp, swaying body skyward, the horror turned for home with its bounty. There would be plenty of time to return later, and feast leisurely upon the others.
Roaring a challenge, Charlene leaped down the steps three at a time. Off balance, she slipped in a pool of Dominic’s blood and fell, skinning a knee and elbow. The carving flew from her hands and clattered across the pavement. Angrily, she leapt to her feet, retrieved the idol, and sprinted in pursuit of her foe. Hastur seemed unaware of the enraged, pitiable thing chasing him. Like a hot air balloon bearing grisly cargo, he drifted placidly toward the terminal and the Lake of Hali, beyond.
Then some primal instinct warned him that he was being pursued by the very one he sought. Dropping his victim like an unwanted trifle, he turned just in time to see the crude image of his likeness tumbling end over end toward his lower extremities . . .
. . . and realized too late his one mistake.
When Charlene hurled the carving at Hastur in frustration and rage, she had meant to kill. But the supranatural powers of the Great Old Ones could not be so easily dispatched.
Even so, Charlene’s desperate act accomplished more than she could hope.
When Haster had mentally directed the subhuman ancients who had made the crude carving of his likeness millenea ago, he had imbued the image with some of his native powers. In doing so, he had never guessed that the image might actually be used against him, causing the gateway to collapse when the powers locked in the idol contacted his alien flesh, and blindly sought to return to their source.
At the precise moment of contact, the powers confined within the idol surged back into Hastur’s alien body like all the electricity in a substation funneling through a single, forty watt lamp.
At the moment of contact, Charlene stood with her neck craned skyward and her fists balled at her sides, mouthing a silent scream of anger. Then, a blinding flash of light exploded outward, erasing the inky darkness from the sky. Excruciating nausea swept through Charlene’s body like a hurricane. And then, she knew no more.
“Ma’am?”
Charlene came sluggishly awake beneath the gentle but insistent shaking of a hand gently gripping her shoulder. Turning her head, she looked at the stewardess with bleary eyes. Briefly, she shrank away and started to scream—at what? She couldn’t remember. Blinking and disoriented, she slumped in her seat.
Seeing she’d roused the sleeping passenger, the pretty flight attendant straightened and smiled. “Sorry if I startled you. We’re in Houston. Time to disembark unless you want to return to Kansas City or Chicago?”
“N—no,” Charlene said, “Thank you. This is where I get off.” Rising from her seat, she opened the overhead compartment to remove her carry-on, but couldn’t find it. Sighing in exasperation and exhaustion, she decided to wait until she got home and rested before calling the airline to report her luggage missing.
Later that evening at her home in northwest Houston, Charlene wearily climbed out of her clothes, placed them in the hamper, and crawled into a steaming hot bath. Minutes later in light sleep, she dreamt of the flight attendant who’d awakened her.
But this time, the attractive young blonde gripped her shoulder not with a hand but with gruesome, writhing tentacles that ate into her flesh like acid.
Charlene came violently awake, thrashing and screaming.
After reporting her luggage missing, Charlene settled into three days of badly needed rest at home, occupying herself with painting and lounging by her pool. There were no further frightening recurrences of her nightmare.
Then on Saturday afternoon at two-fifteen, the phone rang. Excited, Charlene trotted to the kitchen from her dining room to answer the phone; she and her boyfriend Travis Winston were planning to cook out, lounge by the pool over drinks, and get to know each other better. They’d dated several times the past three months, and things looked very promising. Charlene’s 32 year-old biological clock and mating instincts strongly suggested that Travis was the one.
But the person on the other end of the line wasn’t Travis. The formal male voice identified itself as Bradley
Summerville, a representative of the airline upon which Charlene had just traveled.
He wasn’t calling about her missing luggage.
Mr. Summerville had gone on to explain that three passengers aboard her flight had been reported missing by relatives. After describing the missing trio, he asked whether Charlene recalled seeing any of them.
Charlene told Mr. Summerville that she did not.
But after she hung up, she wondered. Something about the call cast a shadow over the remainder of the afternoon. Charlene was preoccupied and distant. Disappointed, Travis went home early.
Later that evening upset at her own behavior, Charlene busied herself with the remainder of catching up on home chores to take her mind off the unexpected phone call, and her uneasy reaction to it. Going to her closet, she picked up the basket full of dirty clothes.
While going through the pockets of the slacks she’d worn on the flight, she discovered two odd little stones shaped like
six-pointed stars. As soon as she touched them, all that had transpired on her flight slammed back into her conscience like a waking nightmare. The carvings tumbled to the carpet from her shocked, nerveless fingers.
Briefly, she stood there, trembling in a cold sweat. Behind her, a sudden wind gust’s invisible fingers crept among the Banana trees and Bird of Paradise plants framing her bedroom window. Suddenly, the Bird of Paradise shadows resembled the mantles of gigantic floating, writhing squids. Other shadows crawling across the curtains seemed to attain horrid shapes that couldn’t be explained by the objects casting them.
Trembling, she stooped and swept the talismans from the carpet, clutching them to her breasts. Running to her bed, she sat one stone on her pillow within easy reach, and withdrew the phone book from its shelf on her bedside table. Leafing frantically through it, she found the number of a plastic surgeon highly recommended by two of her friends. She would call him Monday.
After writing the number down, she dialed Travis and left a message apologizing for her behavior earlier that afternoon, and asked him to come over when he got back from his two day business trip. “Plan on spending the night with me,” she said, and placed the phone in its cradle.
Monday afternoon at three, Charlene answered the phone, and was delighted to find Travis on the other end of the line. “I didn’t think you’d be back until tomorrow evening,” she said.
Clearing his throat, Travis said, “Came down with a bug Sunday afternoon. I’m just getting over it. Had to cancel my trip.”
“You sound terrible,” Charlene said. “You sure you feel like coming over tomorrow?”
“You bet,” he replied in a wheezy voice. “This stuff sounds worse than it actually is. See you then, Char.”
After hanging up, the thing masquerading as Travis paused to wipe gelatinous ooze from the phone’s push buttons with a handkerchief, and wheezed like a battered dime store flute. Its alien vocal cords had never been designed for this strange mode of speech. That, and keeping its body packed into human form was taxing its strength.
Turning, it shambled over to the mangled torso of Travis Winston and stared down at its victim through dozens of pus-ridden eyes. Relaxing control over its alien body, a ragged, gaping vertical gash appeared, starting on its forehead and stopping at its navel. Bending at the waist, it vomited its insides directly onto its victim. Accompanied by wet, slurping sounds like raw liver being kneaded in a bowl, it leisurely digested its victim for the next hour while cloying green mist billowed across the carpet like a gaseous tidal wave. Afterward, it retracted its bloated, slimy organs, and wobbled back into human shape.
If all went well, it would only have to keep up the masquerade for one more day.
Just long enough to take Charlene in its arms.
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