Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998

Fog by Stephen Wasylyk

The Saturday morning fog hung so thick and heavy and wet Howell Dunne felt he could wave a hand and come up with a fistful of water. That was the way things were going lately, he thought. Nothing worked out right.

He turned from the window and walked through the emptiness of the house to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sipped at the black, heavy flavor. For the hundredth time he told himself she had no right to leave, none at all. Something might have been worked out. But then maybe not. She had always been fond of money, and since the business had failed, he’d had little enough of that.

Which was why he had to get rid of the plane. Owning your own aircraft and flying every weekend was a hobby he could no longer afford.

The fog brushed the kitchen window with a million little droplets that distorted the view of the back yard.

Too bad. He had intended to take the plane up this morning for one last flight before turning it over to Westmont, who’d had his eye on it for a long time. There were few AT-6’s left these days, and one in excellent condition like his was worth a good price. Enough to five on for a few months.

He poured the coffee down the drain. To hell with it. He’d go out to the airfield anyway, even though there would be no one there except Marco Fleming. It would be better than sitting around here all morning.

Forty minutes later he pulled up before the small cinder block operations building at the corner of the L-shaped grass field. Extending down the line away from the building, a twin row of planes of various configurations loomed wetly shining and dark, the far end fading into the mist, their pi-lot-owners still sensibly at home in bed.

As he stepped into the dry warmth of the operations office, Marco, feet up on the desk and hands folded over his ample stomach, opened one eye, closed it again, and grunted. “I have to be here, since I own the damned place. You should be at home asleep.”

“I am a seeker of peace and quiet, Marco. Rare commodities these days. You can get them at five thousand feet at dawn or in this hut on a foggy morning. Is the forecast as bad as I think?”

Marco indicated the tireless red light endlessly running across the face of the scanner he kept tuned to aircraft frequencies. “The whole area is closed in.” He swung his feet to the floor. “Heard you sold your bird to Westmont.”

“No choice. Need the money.”

“I thought you broke even when you closed up the business.”

“Came out even. There’s a difference. Almost every cent I had went to pay off the creditors. My wife took what I had left.”

Marco nodded. “Happens all the time.” He hesitated. “Listen, Howell. You were one of the first to back me when I opened up, and you brought your friends, so about that plane of yours. I’d be willing to go along with you for a while on the parking fee and even for a tankful of gas now and then if you want to hold on to it.”

Dunne nodded. “I appreciate that, but all I’d be doing is postponing the inevitable. Hoped to take it up one last time this morning, but the fog killed that idea. Westmont will be here at noon to sign the papers. Think I’ll just check it over before he gets here.”

Between the parked planes the grass was wet, the sod spongy beneath his feet. The stillness was as heavy as the fog, the only sound the whisper of his footsteps. He passed the parked planes slowly. The fog, the winged shapes, the stillness blended to return him to similar days on an airfield in England during World War II.

I suppose you never shake that feeling, no matter how many years pass, he thought wryly.

A small crackling sound made him turn and peer into the fog. He saw nothing. He waited. The sound wasn’t repeated.

He shrugged. A morning like this was ideal for exercising your imagination.

He swung up on the wing of his plane, unlocked the canopy, removed the records he’d need to complete the deal with Westmont, and leaped to the ground, walking around the plane slowly and trailing his fingers through the jewellike condensation on the metal skin. He was reluctant to part with it. In its own way losing the plane meant more to him than losing his wife. Flying had always been important, the kind of flying that took him into the sky alone to do as he pleased and to go where he pleased, a freedom that could never be explained to those who had never experienced it and doesn’t have to be to those who have.

No matter what his future financial condition, it was always possible for him to remarry, but it wasn’t likely that he could ever again afford a plane like this and its upkeep. Giving it up meant a radical change in the way he lived, the loss of something that was an integral part of him.

As he tested the tie-downs, a small sound made him glance back at the mist-hidden operations building. He saw nothing. Maybe someone else was crazy enough to come out this early.

He gave the plane a final pat and went back to the building. He stepped through the door, his muscles stiffening in shock.

Marco lay crumpled in a corner, one hand held to a temple that oozed a rivulet of blood, his mouth open and panic in his eyes.

And then a hard hand between Dunne’s shoulder blades propelled him to Marco’s side, slamming him into the wall. He spun angrily and froze, fear locking his heart and tingling down his spine.

The eyes of the man standing near the doorway were so wide the whites showed and the pupils burned. Only a fool would have defied the large revolver he pointed shakily at Dunne’s stomach.

Dunne held his breath and raised his hands cautiously, shrinking against the wall, unconsciously making himself as small a target as possible.

The man’s hair hung in long, wet strands, his light shirt damp across the shoulders and his slacks soaked to the knees. His cheekbones were as prominent as those on a death’s head, his eyes heavily shadowed, his nose fierce and hooked, his lips thin and colorless.

His voice was a snarl. “I want someone to fly me out of here.”

Dunne cleared his throat. “No one flies in this weather. This field isn’t equipped for it.”

“Don’t give me that!” His voice curled from the walls of the small office. “Do you think I’m dumb? I’ve been on airplanes that flew in worse!”

“Airlines on a commercial field,” Dunne told him. “Where they have the facilities for bad-weather flying. Not small private planes at a grass field like this. Besides, no one is flying today at all. Even the airlines have their minimums.”

The gun lifted. “You take me out or I shoot you both! Understand?”

Dunne took a deep breath. “You don’t understand. Trying to take off in weather like this from a field like this can kill you very quickly.”

“They’ll kill me anyway! Now, which of you is going to do it?”

Dunne held his voice level. “I told you. Nobody flies on a day like this in planes like these.”

The eyes burned, the mind behind them beyond reason and sanity. The man’s lips worked soundlessly, and Dunne felt he was only a heartbeat away from dying. Cold sweat covered his palms and trickled between his shoulder blades.

After an immeasurable, unbearable moment of time, the man seemed to grow calmer, his eyes narrowing, a crafty look on his face. “You own one of those planes?”

Dunne hesitated. “Yeah, but it isn’t equipped for instrument flying.”

The barrel of the gun motioned. “Step away from him.”

Dunne moved a few feet to one side.

The man leveled the revolver at Marco’s head, peering down the sights as though he were hoping Dunne would give him a reason to pull the trigger. “You take me or I kill him.” Marco’s eyes, raised to Dunne’s, pleaded for him to do something. Time, thought Dunne. We need time. Go along with him until we run out of it.

He reached above his head and took down the keys to a four-seater Cessna with twin engines — better equipped with navigational and radio equipment than any other plane on the field, even though the equipment was not all it could have been or the latest in design.

“All right,” he said.

The gun gestured. “He goes, too.”

“We don’t need him.”

The smile was sly. “How else you going to do what I tell you?”

The man might have been crazy, but he really wasn’t stupid. Once away from Marco, Dunne had hoped for a chance to jump him and get that gun away. He might fail, but the way things were, he really didn’t have much to lose. Marco did.

He stepped out into the fog that was now as menacing and deadly as the gaunt-faced man who followed, his gun jammed into Marco’s back.

The Cessna was parked only a few planes from the office. Dunne checked the tanks and found them full, mentally cursing Marco for being so conscientious, because filling them would have delayed matters. He fumbled away minutes releasing the tie-downs and kicking the chocks away from the wheels, all the while trying to come up with a way to avoid flying the plane and finding none. When he climbed into the cabin, Marco followed, taking the right-hand seat, the man sitting behind them.

Since no miracle had materialized out of the fog to save them, Dunne buckled himself in tightly. The experienced Marco did the same. The man did not.

Dunne spoke over his shoulder. “If we do make it, where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere. Just get me away from those cops. They want to kill me.”

“Anywhere is likely where we will end up,” Dunne muttered to Marco. He fired up the engines and studied the gauges.

The revolver poked at his neck. “What are you waiting for?”

Tension gave him the courage to snap, “Get that thing the hell away from me! I wouldn’t take off in good weather with a cold engine, let alone a day like this. Now, you sit there and wait until I’m satisfied this plane is ready to go, or you can damned well pull that trigger and take your chances with the cops.”

Again he felt that he was only a heartbeat away from dying, but the man sank back. “Just make it fast.”

The needles climbed. He ran the engines up, playing with them, delaying, still hoping for that miracle to appear out of the fog.

The revolver poked at his neck. “Let’s go. This time I mean it.”

The tone in the voice made him release the brakes and gun the Cessna out between the parked planes, the aircraft rocking and sluggish on the soft earth. He was rapidly running out of time to do something that would bring this madness to an end, but that gun muzzle remained an inch from Marco’s head. Even if the police the man was running from heard the engines and investigated, they would be too late to save them now.

His mind probed desperately for a way to disable the plane, to buy more time. Hook a wing into a tree, he thought, but deep down he knew the man would accept no excuses. He would kill them both.

Sweating, moving the plane slowly, he worked his way through the mist, and only instinct and the years he had flown from Marco’s field brought him without accident to the bright orange cones that marked the takeoff area.

Here the fog seemed even thicker and more deadly. Mouth dry, he felt trapped — both the fog before him and the man behind him could kill, but with the fog he at least had a chance.

“God,” said Marco, his voice on the edge of panic, “I don’t see how you’re going to make it. You can’t see far enough to get lined up straight.”

“Tell him that, Marco, and see what it gets you.”

The gun poked. “Both of you shut up.”

Dunne went through his takeoff procedure carefully, still delaying, still hoping for a miracle that never came, getting instead another cruel poke in the neck with the gun muzzle. “Let’s go.”

“Get the wheels,” he told Marco, eased the throttles open, and released the brakes. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a pale Marco brace himself, the hands in his lap squeezed so tightly the knuckles were white.

Even on that soggy field the plane leaped forward, and they hurtled into soft nothingness, not knowing where the trees were or if they would clear them. He felt the plane lift slightly, and at that moment they were committed; no way to stop and no way to turn back.

He eased the wheel back gently. The nose wheel lifted, the bumping and thudding ceased, and they left the ground, a hard knot grinding in the pit of his stomach in anticipation of dark shapes of trees bursting out of the fog so quickly they would have time only to scream before being smashed into a fiery ball.

“Wheels,” he said.

Marco touched the switch, and as the wheels retracted, an almost imperceptible darkening in the fog on his right warned him and he flipped the wheel over as a tall pine slid under the wing. Marco gasped. Dunne felt the sweat trickling down his face, and then they were above a hundred feet, the pines below them. He let his breath out slowly.

Suspended in the grayness with no sensation of movement even though the engines were roaring and the plane vibrating, they remained caught in a wet wooliness with only the instruments to tell Dunne what they were doing, his ears straining for the slightest change in the sound of the engines. The minutes scraped across his nerves.

So slowly it was sensed rather than seen, the mist gradually became lighter, indicating they were approaching the top. Dunne began to breathe again. The altimeter indicated a thousand feet.

The fog slid by quickly until they could look down and see it stretched in all directions like soft cotton batting that had been soiled here and there. Above, long dark strings of an approaching front masked the sun so they hung suspended between layers of mist and cloud in a gray, disordered world.

Marco wiped the perspiration from his face.

“Try the radio,” Dunne told him. He leveled off and started a big circle.

Marco said, “They’re calling us.”

The gunman thrust his face between them. “What do you mean they’re calling us?”

“They see us on their radar screens,” explained Marco.

“You mean they know I’m up here?”

“Not you,” said Dunne soothingly. “Someone. They don’t know who. That’s why they’re calling.”

The man snatched the phones from Marco’s head and pressed one to his ear. Dunne slipped on his set.

The voice was insistent and authoritative. “—please identify. Please identify. Penalties for violating regulations can be severe.”

“What’s he talking about?” asked the gunman.

“Nothing to concern you. They don’t like an airplane flying around in this weather without knowing who it is.”

The man cackled. “Tell him we’re an unidentified flying object.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Dunne said.

The gun dug at his cheek, and the voice was cold. “If you won’t tell him, I will. How do I do it?”

Dunne nodded at Marco. Marco handed the man the microphone. “Just press the button to talk.”

The man held the microphone to his lips and yelled, “We’re from Mars, you creep! We’ve come to destroy the world!”

He laughed long and loud and crazily.

The controller’s voice came back, low and serious. “Unidentified aircraft, do you have a passenger aboard named Turner?”

The gunman screamed, the sound crashing around their ears. “You said he didn’t know I was up here!”

Dunne’s skin crawled. The police searching for Turner must have been close enough to hear them take off, put two and two together, and phoned the information in to the controller, asking him to keep track of them.

“You tricked me!” Turner yelled. “They weren’t supposed to know I was flying away like a bird!” He began to sob. “Damn it, I can’t even get away from them even up here! It’s all your fault!”

The insanity that lurked behind the wide eyes exploded in a deafening roar as he shot Marco.

The second bullet hit the instrument panel as Dunne desperately jerked the wheel over hard and threw Turner off balance; the third smashed through the directional gyro as he jammed the wheel forward; the fourth tugged at his sleeve and also smashed through the instrument panel as he kicked the rudder.

Turner fired the fifth just as Dunne rolled the plane fast, the bullet tearing through his calf and leaving his leg numb.

Then he pulled up hard, the force of gravity driving him into his seat and pinning the tumbling Turner to the floor. Still Turner pulled the trigger again, missing Dunne again and demolishing the panel further, but by then his head was between the seats, pinned there by the G-force, within reach of Dunne’s fist. He chopped down hard, catching Turner on the jaw and feeling it crack, and chopped again and again to be sure he was out.

He eased the plane level and sat breathing hard as pain slowly replaced the numbness in his leg. The air rushed through the holes Turner had drilled in the nose with a high pitched howl that filled and chilled the cabin. Hands trembling, Dunne dug out his handkerchief and knotted it around his calf.

He looked at Marco once and couldn’t look again. Marco had been a good friend.

Almost wonderingly, he ran a hand over the remains of the instrument panel. If Turner had taken aim, he couldn’t have done more damage. Those random bullets had not only smashed the instruments but had severed the vacuum and electrical lines so that almost all of the dials that hadn’t been splintered were inoperative.

Even the slight hum in his earphones was gone. One of those bullets had taken the radio out, too.

Shivering in the cold air rushing into the plane, wondering how he could still be alive, he was slow to think about the trouble he was in, and when he did, panic flickered inside and threatened to break out in a scream.

He was sitting above a heavy layer of fog with no way to get down through it safely.

Before the shooting he hadn’t been concerned about landing even if the fog remained because then he had flight instruments to tell him the attitude of the plane, whether he was going up or down, banking or turning or skidding even though he couldn’t see, and he had the radio to contact fields that had instrument landing facilities. He could be talked down even though the Cessna lacked complete navigational equipment.

That was impossible now. He was lost and blind and hurt, and there was no way he could go down into that fog without killing himself and perhaps people on the ground.

And with the blood running out of his calf and filling his shoe, he couldn’t even circle and hope the fog would lift before he ran out of fuel.

He slammed the useless earphones to the floor. Turner’s bullets had killed him as effectively as they had Marco.

Slowly bleeding, growing number from shock and cold, he clutched the wheel with both hands, circled slowly, and tried to think as his blood drained from him, eventually finding his mind drifting, images from his past coming and going; the day he met his wife for the first time; the first order he had written that had set his new business on its feet; the feeling he had when he first soloed and found himself alone in the sky.

He sank deeper toward unconsciousness and — as when he had walked between the parked planes — the roaring of the engines, the clouds overhead, and the fog below stirred forgotten memories of the war, this time of a day when he had been returning from a mission alone, separated from the others by a fight and bad weather.

Slightly ahead and below him he had seen another Mustang trailing a faint stream of black smoke and pulled up beside it. The canopy was half blasted away, bullet holes stitched through the metal skin behind the pilot, and a red-stained scarf wrapped around the pilot’s neck flapped in the airstream.

Eyes above the mask resigned, the pilot covered his eyes and then his mouth with his hand. Dunne knew what he meant. His instruments and radio were both out, and without them the man had no way to get through the clouds below.

Dunne motioned the man to take position on his wing, held up two fingers, and pointed down. The man nodded.

Dunne took them both down through the clouds, feeling his way lower and lower until the dark shapes of the trees lifted eager branches to pluck them from the sky, and then the field was below them and Dunne brought them both in.

The pilot had been a blue-eyed, dark-haired twenty-year-old named Castle on his third mission, holding himself tall and appearing older than his years.

“I owe you one,” Castle said quietly. “I’ll pay you back someday.”

A week later he hit a string of high-tension wires while strafing an airfield, his Mustang leaving a black scar in the snow of a farmer’s field.

Dunne jerked erect as one of the engines missed a beat. He was very tired. His head sagged again.

He fought off the stupor.

Once. Twice.

Each lift of his head became more difficult, and then it didn’t seem to matter any longer. His wife was gone, his business was gone, and in a larger sense, so was his entire life. In essence, he had been dead before he entered the operations building and found Turner there.

Still, he lifted his head again, something inside unwilling to concede defeat.

He blinked and drew a hand across his eyes.

Slightly ahead and to one side was a Mustang, so close he could see the rivets and the heat streaks from the engine, the canopy half blasted away, a red-stained scarf around the pilot’s neck, the man’s eyes above the oxygen mask.

Dunne stared. Castle. But the kid was dead. What was he doing here?

The conviction grew in Dunne that he was dying and the kid had come to lead him through the shadows to his eventual destination. He sighed. If that was the way it was to be, the matter was out of his hands.

He tucked his wing inside the Mustang’s resignedly, and with a dead man beside him and an unconscious maniac on the floor, he entered the fog-flying formation with a plane out of the past, not knowing where he was going and not caring, his mind frozen, until the pilot lifted a hand and pointed downward. Dunne took his eyes from the plane and saw a broad runway rushing beneath him. He cut the switches and brought the Cessna in on its belly, sliding and scraping along the runway. He was certain he was dead, but the only thing that concerned him was that wheels-up landing. It was a helluva way for an experienced pilot to arrive in heaven or hell, as the case might be.

He fumbled feebly at the seatbelt to get out to face whatever awaited him, but the effort was too great. He passed out.

When he awoke, he was staring at a dun-colored ceiling, dimly remembering being lifted and carried, hearing concerned voices, being pulled and jostled. So he was alive after all. How or why he didn’t know.

The memory of that Mustang remained with the freshness of a dream retained. What had it been? An illusion? Hallucination? Ghost out of the past? The product of a lively imagination stimulated by circumstance? None of those things could explain how it had brought him down through the fog.

He lay still, a hollow feeling inside, trying to find an answer if there was one.

A woman came into the room, tall, her hair cut short and touched with gray. Once pretty, her face had matured into smooth planes that gave her an attractiveness and dignity youth could never have.

She smiled. “You would wake up when I was out of the room. How do you feel?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Stethoscope plugged into her ears, she examined him quickly. “I think you’re fine, Mr. Dunne. If you want to get it over with now, you have my permission.”

“Get what over with?”

“Talking to all of the people waiting to see you. You’re a hero, you know. Everyone wants to know what happened, and you’re the only one who can tell the entire story. All anyone knows at present is what little we were able to get from Mr. Turner, who spoke mostly gibberish before we wired his broken jaw shut and strapped him to a bed in the psychiatric ward.

“You were very lucky. The man killed three people, attacked the two policemen attempting to bring him in, and escaped in the fog. It was rather obvious that he killed the other man in the plane and almost succeeded in killing you before you somehow subdued him, but there are many questions only you can answer.”

Dunne closed his eyes. Describing what had happened up until the time the Mustang had appeared and led him down would be no problem. The question was — how could he explain that? He looked up at her. “If you had a story you were certain no one would believe, would you tell the truth or would you lie?”

She smiled. “Mr. Dunne, I’m old enough to know that there are many occasions when telling the truth serves no useful purpose.”

She was right, thought Dunne. What had happened concerned him and no one else. He alone would have to live with it and accept it for what it had given him — the chance to go on from here.

That, at least, explained why the Mustang had appeared — the payment of a debt held beyond time and understanding.

The rest was masked by fog deeper than that the Mustang had brought him through; so dense and vast man had never penetrated it in the whole of his existence. He wouldn’t even try.