And the pale, stiff face of Enic Graf was growing dim, distant. Fog shadowed it.
"We'll be together up here in the heights," he was promising me, not loudly, but from worlds away. "Together, Katharine"
I was hanging limp against my safety belt. It was the only solid thing in the universe. And I went deaf, blind. I was swallowed by black silence.
Then a roar, a prickling sensation in my toes, and lurid light in my eyes; it sounded as though the motor was going. And a high, anxious voice was dinning at me: "Lady! Lady, are you all right?"
I pawed at my face, sat up straight. The plane was traveling on a level once more. And the pilot, his heavy hands on the controls, was sitting with his thin face half over his shoulder.
"That was a close call," he told me, striving hard to sound cheerful.
"Was it?" I mumbled idiotically. I knew that I looked unkempt, that my hat must be askew, my rouge smeared. For the moment I did not care. "What happened to us?" I demanded.
"Well, I don't rightly know," he said, slowly and embarrassedly, like a schoolboy unable to recite. "I got up above the clouds, 'way up there, and tried to level her out—and she kept going up."
He shook his head and thrust out his thin jaw. "Nothing jammed or anything, because it's all right now. But she kept going up, up, as if a big hand had grabbed us and was lifting us."
"Yes," I prompted. "And then?"
"Then I seemed to pass out. Maybe the air was thin . . . but I didn't have any sense of danger. It was more like leaning back while the relief pilot takes the controls. Does that sound crazy?"
"Not very crazy," I assured him. "But you don't remember what happened?"
"Not a thing," he confessed. "Not until we were falling, and I shook it off and pulled us out of the dive."
I gazed at him searchingly. "What's your name, pilot?"
"Alvin Piper." He cleared his throat. "If you're going to make a complaint, lady, that's your privilege. But I got a wife and two kids in school"
"I won't complain," I promised. "I was wondering, Mr. Piper, if you ever knew a pilot named Graf. Enic Graf."
"Graf? I don't think so—no, wait." He nodded fiercely. "I used to know a Graf who tested for the Stearman people. Had a broken nose, and a big scar on his hand."
"That's right," I agreed.
We suddenly sailed into a dim clearness. Moonlight washed the fogged windows.
"Weather's breaking up already, " the pilot informed me with deep satisfaction. "That's Wichita up ahead, where the lights are. . . . But what's Enic Graf got to do with this business, lady? He died a year ago."
"Did he?" I asked, and in spite of myself I laughed shortly.
The pilot looked at me strangely, wonderingly, but I could not tell him why I doubted. I could not tell Swithin, or my brother Bill. I could not tell anyone.
I knew only that I must never fly again, lest Enic be waiting for me in the upper abyss.
