False Witness (Part 3)

When he awoke, his skin was clammy and cold, his head full of fog. Danny had a vague awareness that hours had passed, not minutes. He shivered against the chill air, wrapping his arms around himself. Breath wisped in the air with each exhalation. 

Slowly, he let his eyes focus on the headrest, then the window next to him, it’s plastic shutter pulled down. He stretched out, hearing the click of joints unlocking. Danny spread his extremities, keen to dispel the stiffness of sleep and cold.

His right arm should have reached across his neighbour, but there was plenty of room to move. Owens was gone. In fact, now Danny took the trouble to notice, only one other passenger on this row was in their seat: the woman from his nightmares slumped, asleep, against her window across the aisle. 

Danny unclipped his seatbelt and stood, hoping to find a steward to explain the cold. He looked to the front of standard class, then the back. Once, twice, then over again.

Danny struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. He clasped the headrest of seat in front between his arms, overtaken by bewilderment and dizziness. 

“Where is everyone?” he said, but there was nobody to answer.  Apart from the sleeping woman, the cabin was empty. 

Now firmly in the cold grip of terror, Danny moved over to Eloise. He shook her by the shoulder. She groaned, tried to shake him off. 

“The plane is empty.” he said, as if her role was to explain this all to him.

It took a minute more of cajoling until she opened her eyes. The woman seemed even groggier than Danny had been. Hair stuck sweatily to her face; her eyes vacant, unfocused. 

“What’s your name?” 

“Ugh?” 

“What’s your name? I’ve seen you before, a long time ago, I think.”

“Eloise. My name is Eloise.” A mid-west American accent, precisely the voice Danny knew he would hear, the voice from his dream. 

“Eloise. You need to wake up.”  He looked around and found a bottle of water jammed into the pocket of a seat.  He uncapped it and put the water to her lips.  After a moment, she drank, taking the bottle from him. 

She looked around and saw the emptiness of the plane, and dragged a hand over her face. “What the fuck?”

“I’m going to the front.” Danny said, “We have to talk to the pilot.”

But before he could raise himself, a crackle came over the speakers, the sound you hear before the pilot welcomes you to the flight and says the weather is fine and you should be arriving at your destination on time. But that wasn’t the voice that followed. 

“Danny and Eloise.”  It said.

They froze. For Danny, it was the fulfilment of a curse, the keeping of a deadly promise he’d never asked for, never wanted.

In the silence that followed, the pair sat stock still, hands locked to the arm-wrests.  When the speaker said no more, Danny called out, “Where is everyone?  What’s happening?” 

“Gone.” The answer came. “We didn’t need them anymore.”

Danny realised the heat was returning to the cabin now. His breath no longer danced in the air ahead of him. Whilst he’d been asleep, (drugged?) someone had depressurised the plane, opened the doors. They’d… Danny thought about all the people he’d seen boarding. 

“Please God, no. Oh Christ, no.” he said. 

There was a bitter edge to the reply over the speaker. “Bad names! Bad words!” It screeched. “We don’t say those names anymore.” 

There was a bang and a crash from the front of the plane, then a vile hiss pierced the air, as if a huge snake were slithering its way towards them. But this was no snake. Footsteps were approaching from behind the curtain.  Danny had to fight the urge to leap from his seat and race away, towards the back of the plane.

The footsteps paused at the drapes, then pulled them aside. 

The creature stood before them, bold, unashamed. 

All those years ago, Danny and Eloise had stolen glimpses of a creature whose form and voice clearly defied nature. But even in their worst imaginings, it was still a thing from the physical world, comprehensible to their mind’s eye: A monstrous man-child or a nymph with humanoid limbs. 

Now it stood before them, unhidden, they realised how wrong they’d been. This was a demon of biblical lore, a medieval etching cast into physical being. Sight of the creature pressed in on their cosseted minds.

Danny found himself taking quick, truncated breaths through his mouth, a technique he’d learned as a younger man to ward off panic attacks. 

Eloise simply whispered the same word over and over “No, no. no…”

They pushed back in their seats, as hard as they could. Danny reached a hand out in front of his face, an instinctive gesture, seeking to block his view of the thing in the aisle. 

It tall perhaps 7 feet tall. Its head brushed along the ceiling of the cabin and even then, its back was arched. The creature’s long thin body was emaciated, with blotchy grey skin draped over jutting ribs. Spindly shoulders and arms were anatomically correct up to the elbows, where they morphed into the yellow avian talons.

Patches of its body were covered with tired, dirty feathers. In other places, the skin lay naked, the colour of decay. 
From the waist downwards it had the form of a goat or some other farmyard animal, inverted ankle joints leading to hooves, supplemented, in one final insult to nature, with human toes. 

Yet, the creature’s body was as nothing compared to its head and face, where true abomination now revealed itself.  It had two giant compound eyes, hundreds of tiny silver mirrors packed together, stygian black, swallowing the light. The ears were long and curved, arcing back behind its head, and bobbing in time with the twitch, twitch, twitch of its head. Inside its mouth, an oversized tongue fidgeted for space behind razor sharp teeth. 

“Time to repay Him. Such a simple thing.” It croaked, the throaty cadence all the more repulsive now that it was delivered in plain sight. 

It was Eloise who summoned the courage to reply, but there was no defiance in her voice, only a resigned awe.  “Who? Why? Please, I don’t understand?” 

“The one who sent me. Who told me to find you. To prepare you.”

“What do you want from us?” Danny asked. 

“To bear witness.”

Danny started to raise himself out of his seat, thinking he might escape into the aisle, flea to the toilets at the back, lock himself in. The plane had to land sometime, right?

But it lifted a freakish talon and pointed at him, a tooth-filled grin spreading even wider, across the width of its face.  “No running, no hiding.” It hissed, then took one, two three steps forward. Its talon pointed back and forth between them. 

“Dead.” It said, “No running, no hiding. Already dead.”

Closer and closer it came. Eloise could feel herself crumbling, breaking down into the little girl who wanted to walk to school on her own. Her entire life since 2003 had been leading inexorably to this moment, she saw that now. Nothing had mattered. Her career, caring for her sick mother, two regretful marriages. This thing, this monster had locked her into a single path, moving relentlessly down a single inescapable path.

“Fulfil your purpose, dead things. See what must be seen.”

From beyond the cabin, came the sound of a massive explosion. The plane shook violently, gripped by turbulence. Danny and Eloise were thrown one way, then another. The thing in the aisle stood steady against the shaking, seemingly unperturbed.

“It begins.” It said.

“What begins?” Danny whispered, but in his heart, he already knew. He and Eloise had been chosen to behold some great and final act. Walking dead, the perfect false witnesses. The weight of realisation offered a strange dampening of the senses. His mind was retreating, pulling in on itself. When it spoke again, the creature’s words seemed to come from a far off place.

“See what must be seen.” It pointed to the windows. 

Both Danny and Eloise looked at the window. They were all shuttered. 

A deafening crack came from somewhere below the plane, as if a giant spurt of lightning and thunder had come out of the Earth below them. The plane shook, less violently this time, but somehow the sound was more disturbing than the explosion. In his mind’s eye, Danny imagined the Earth breaking open like an egg. 

“Fulfil your purpose. Look.” It said. 

Eloise tugged the sleeve of Danny’s shirt. “Go,” she said. “To your place. Do as it says.” She gestured for Danny to return to his seat.  

She was right.  They had no choice. He stood and went back to his seat by the window. 

“Look” The creature said, but its voice was softer than before. At last, his unruly servants were doing his bidding.

Danny and Eloise shared one more look. Child and teenager. Full of terror and wonder. 

“Now.” Eloise said and, in unison, they turned to their windows and opened the shutters. 

 

THE END