Flight to Darkness

FLIGHT TO DARKNESS

by

Gil Brewer

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

New Pulp Press on Smashwords

Flight to Darkness

Copyright © 1952 by Gil Brewer

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* * * * *

FLIGHT TO DARKNESS

Chapter 1

You know how it is when you believe you should
do a thing, rushing ahead toward it because it’s a kind of
adventure, before you realize you should have stayed in bed? Well,
it dawned on me too late. That last day at the veteran’s hospital
in California was rugged. But I’d waited a long time. I was
optimistic.

Leda Thayer stood just at the head of the
stairs as I came down the corridor that morning. I wanted to stop
and talk with her, maybe touch her, but I had to see Prescott. It
would be the last time.

She came up to me and her eyes were full of
hell.

“
Eric, you sure look
different.”

“
No bathrobe or pajamas.” I
grinned, took her hand and felt that way. She was wearing her white
nylon nurse’s uniform. It was the one that was always too tight in
exactly the right way beneath her breasts and across her hips, and
she was lovely. She had long shapely thighs, and her auburn hair
was bright, full of light even in the somber, clinical nakedness of
the hallway. There was in her face, in the damp turn of her lips, a
secret lasciviousness. Deep-breasted, vigorous, Leda was like a
lush, tropical flower blooming poisonously through a crack in a
stretch of hot cement sidewalk. Her hand was warm.

“
You going in there?” She nodded
toward the chief neuropsychiatrist’s office.

“
Yes.”

“
Anyway, it’s over
with.”

“
All but the goodbyes.”

“
Baby can’t wait.” Her deep blue
eyes got smoky as she watched me. “I like you in a suit of clothes.
My big old Viking. Wish you’d grow a beard. A big blond
beard.”

“
So I could tickle you?”

“
Much.”

“
I better go.”

“
All right.” She leaned in close,
kissed me, her lips soft and hot, and for that brief instant we
said something against each other not alone with lips. “I’m not so
patient anymore.”

“
Good for baby.” Inside I was
scared but still optimistic. I watched Leda go on down the hall.
She moved quickly, lithely, in her crepe-soled shoes, and I liked
to hear the very soft hiss of her dress.

Dr. Prescott seemed to have changed. Only I
knew he hadn’t. He’d been the ogre with whom I’d spent a good share
of my time during the past year.

He didn’t rise from behind his desk. “How’s it
feel?”

“
Damned fine, Doc.”

I went over and sat in the good old chair
beside the desk which seemed a little different now.

We looked at each other for a while. He smiled
in his calm way and folded his hands on the desk blotter. The
office had changed, too. There was the table up against the wall
where Prescott administered the electrotherapy treatments, but the
table no longer held that cloudy vision of terror. At least not for
me. The windows were the same, only like everything else—different,
somehow. There’d been a time when I had stared at those blinds and
watched them grin at me, wink—even speak.

“
You’re going home. You feel okay
about that?”

“
Sure,” I told him. It was a lie. I
was scared, but it had to be all right because it was the only way.
My stomach burned and my nerves were like banjo strings.

Prescott looked at his folded hands and pale
sunlight ricocheted off the tiny bald spot on his skull. He wasn’t
much older than my twenty-eight, but I imagined he supposed he was
old as hell. His manner had always been a trifle supercilious. He
had washed-out gray eyes, straw-colored hair, and he sported a
mustache of perhaps nineteen hairs, which was incessantly
scraggled. He always wore a blue polka-dot bow tie and, as now, a
wrinkled gray gabardine suit. He didn’t have too much chin, but his
overlarge Adam’s-apple helped compensate for the lack. His voice
was rather high and, to me, irritating.

Prescott and I had been through a lot
together.

“
Anything happen since I’ve seen
you?”

“
Nope.”

“
Sleep well?”

“
Fine.”

“
Dream?”

“
Usual.”

“
Thought we’d get rid of that.
Intervals are longer, anyway. How long is it this time?”

“
Been a week and a
half.”

“
How did you kill him?”

“
Same way, Doc. With a wooden
mallet.”

He let that coast for a while. Then he cleared
his throat. “We can’t allow you to run around being
haunted.”

“
Like I told you, Doc—it doesn’t
bother me anymore.”

“
Yeah. Only you still go right
ahead killing your brother every once in a while.”

I shrugged. “It’s a dream.” Somebody strummed
the banjo strings. It had to be a dream. . . .

“
I remember very clearly how you
acted when you came in here,” Prescott said. “At least we’ve helped
you some.”

“
That or it’s wearing itself
out.”

“
You always doubted we could help
you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“
Eric. You’re sure this dream no
longer bothers you?”

He was very serious and I suddenly felt sorry
for the poor devil. How could he really know? He couldn’t. How
could I tell him? I had to lie eight-tenths of the time now,
because I was leaving the hospital today and this was goodbye. I’d
been passed, I was okay. Sure.

“
It doesn’t bother me. I don’t get
in a sweat anymore. If I pound in my brother’s head with a wooden
mallet in a dream, it’s all right. Isn’t it?”

“
Just dandy.” He sighed, shook his
head. “Only he’s not even your brother, really. Adopted into the
family.”

“
I’ve always known him as my
brother.”

“
Only you knew he wasn’t. Eric,
we’ve done all we can—”

“
But you don’t really know a damn
bit more than you did when I came in here. Right?”

It was his turn to keep quiet. We sat there
for a time without speaking. Then he looked at me. “You say you
hate your brother’s guts. What’s going to happen when you see
him?”

“
Nothing.” God, I thought, suppose
he won’t let me go. “So we hate each other,” I said. “We’ve been
over all this, Doc.”

He went on just the same. He always would and
perhaps someday he’d write a book, as many of them did. “There was
this man—” maybe it would be the last time— “this new man, who came
up to the third platoon as a replacement. He looked like your
brother.”

I sighed. A spider was building a web under
the table where they gave the electrotherapy. Maybe it was a black
widow.

I knew what he was thinking. He would be going
over the same old story in his mind, searching for the loose ends
that weren’t there, and my raced back, too. I’d been in charge of
the platoon, a buck sergeant, because it was down to that and oh
God all the rest of it, the platoon wiped out on a ridge, all but
myself and this new replacement who looked like Frank, my brother,
in the bloody twilight with the guns, so the two of us tried to get
back to our lines only this other man was now thinking two would
draw enemy fire so he lost his head and he tried to kill me and get
back alone then I knocked him on the head with a rifle butt and
started shouldering him back but I remembered how I hated Frank,
damn him, and this was suddenly Frank on my back hating me while
they laid a barrage just for us boxed in and then the man Frank
came to so I hated him all my life and I picked up the wooden
mallet and smashed his head in.

—
Claim you killed him only it
wasn’t your brother and you know that now.

—
Still worse that way.

—
You got hit then too,
machine-gunned through both legs, slow tick-tick-tick-tick-tick,
and shell fragments in your back, but you brought Frank in carrying
him on your back, and he was dead.

—
Yes.

—
Raved around telling them what you
had done.

—
I killed my brother.

—
Came to a hospital.

—
Yes.

—
Only it wasn’t your brother and
you hadn’t killed him; there was no wooden mallet!

—
Yes there is!

—
Where in God’s name would you find
a wooden mallet on the battlefield in Korea where countless men saw
what happened, saw this man killed by enemy machine-gun fire while
he was being hauled and carried by you, killed by the same gun that
got you in the legs because he melted the soap carvings. . .
.

Prescott had said nothing.

I tried to control my heart and breathing.
They were very rapid. Perspiration brightened the backs of my
hands. I didn’t brush it away because Prescott would
notice.

His voice was quite calm. “I swear you still
believe you killed him. With that damned wooden mallet. And you
dream it all the time. Only now it is your brother.”

I stared at the floor. “I don’t believe it
anymore.”

“
All right.” He sighed. He didn’t
believe me, either. “Because of hate. You hated each other all your
lives. Because you want to be a sculptor; you are now. But then you
had these prize-winning soap carvings on the shelf in your room.
Six years old. You came home from school and Frank had melted them
down in a pail. He was pouring the melted soap over the shelf.
Kids. And he said—”

“
Not that alone, Doc. We fought all
through childhood. I still hate his guts.”

“
All right. The thieving, the lies.
You tried to kill him time after time when you were kids. Malarky.
But he didn’t stop. But not to kill him, Eric. There’s no reason
for that. Even thinking you had—out there. Dreaming it all the
time—with a wooden mallet.”

“
It’s a wooden mallet I use when I
work with stone. With a chisel. It’s hanging on a rack back home
right now.”

“
And for a time you went after
people. Fought with them. You go berserk, Eric. Probably a
defensive attitude of some kind stemming from the obsession.” Again
he sighed. “It’ll be a good while before you lose that damned
dream.”

“
It’s all right.”

“
We wouldn’t let you go if we
didn’t think it was all right. It was a dream on the battlefield,
Eric. Battle fatigue—could happen to anyone. The recurrence of the
dream is because you still feel yourself guilty, dream or not, and
not only of the dream, either. You hate your brother. But not
enough to kill him. It frightens you, back there someplace in your
mind. Until that part of you is convinced it’s a dream, that the
man was machine-gunned by an enemy apart from you—until that time,
Eric, you’ll continue to dream and go through your own particular
hell. Because you could never kill him.”

Some fiend played havoc with the banjo
strings. My jaws ached from being clamped together so
tightly.

“
Permit me, Eric. It could be
you’re the son-of-a-bitch.” Prescott colored slightly. “You have
all, he had nothing. Yet you slaughter him in your dreams. Guilt,
Eric. Damn it, we can’t do anything more. Unless you want to live
here for a few years. You’re oriented. The dreams wearing itself
out, as you say.” He paused, breathed deeply. “Just that you’re a
little crazier in a more positive way than I am, or anybody else.”
He lifted his hands, dropped them to the desk, stared at them. Then
he slowly raised his eyes beneath his brows and watched me. “You
sure there’s nothing new?”