read by, and in any case a humming vibration of the craft would make reading uncomfortable. I leaned back and closed my eyes, thinking of Bill and his approaching happiness, of the gift I had brought for the Mrs. Bill to be — a Zorinos cape, one I would have loved to keep. It was stowed behind me, in one of the suitcases, all of brown skins sewed together in little bands that displayed in a succession of patterns, like the graining of fine wood, the pelt-markings. She would like it, no matter what type of woman she might be. The thought came, and I dismissed it, of the day when my own wedding had been at hand, and the news of Enic's crash came like a heavy door slamming against my face. And then I was asleep. I dreamed the plane was falling.
I awakened with a sickening jerk. I may have screamed. The pilot turned halfway around.
"What's the matter, lady?" he called above the growl of the motor.
"I had a bad dream," I called back.
"Don't be scared. No danger. Just bumpy weather—clouds. I'm going to get above them."
There was evidendy rain, and the windows were thickly misted. The pilot did things with his controls, and again the nose of the craft lifted itself, as though it climbed steep stairs. I could see the hands of the pilot on his instruments. They, at least, were typical, comfortingly so—big, blunt, capable. Enic's hands had been long and sensitive, like a surgeon's or a violinist's, and across the back of his right hand had sprawled a jagged Z of a scar. Again I drove the thought of him from my mind, and lay back for another snatch of the sleep that seemed determined to possess me.
My awakening was calm. The plane flew on a smooth level, and light filled the abyss outside my window. I mopped with one gloved hand at the glass, and peered out into a sky filled with the light of the great cream-colored moon. Far below were the clouds, or what must be the clouds, a drab continent without visible rent or lump in it. I gasped with the beauty of it, then with the terror of thinking how high we must be.
"What's our altitude, pilot?" I cried out, trying to be gay.
His head began to turn on his stooped shoulders — to turn slowly, slowly. And of a sudden I thought I was going mad.
It was not his lean face that came around, but the face of another, a face that I knew. Square jaw, wide lips with bracket-like lines at their corners, proud broken nose, eyes as deep and dark and shining as two pools by lanternlight—so pale, so stiff, so utterly without the flavor of Enic Graf, yet so unmistakably Enic.
Frost-cold nails of fear dug into my backbone. I reasoned with myself, flatly and a little stupidly, as one reasons with a panicky child. This wasn't Enic—Enic's handful of remains had gone to the grave twelve months before. It was a mask. That was it, a false face, cunningly made but not cunningly enough.
I leaned forward.
"This is a very poor joke," I said, too loudly for dignity. "And it's a cruel one."
And I heard his soft chuckle, as plainly as though the engine had shut off—his soft, deep chuckle, the chuckle with which Enic once maddened and conquered me. The face came all the way around, and, for all its stiffness and dead pallor, the eyes were bright and alive.
