A Joy Ride

A Joy Ride

by

Frank L. Packard, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.

This undated short story was not found in any previously published form./drf Stillwoods.Blogspot.Ca

2500 Words.

It is, most people will admit, startling enough to be suddenly confronted in the dark of one’s own private grounds by a masked man and, coincidently, to have the muzzle of a revolver thrust between one’s eyes, but that is as nothing compared with what followed.

“Lift your voice, utter a sound, make a move other than I direct and you are a dead man!”—was flung at me in a fierce, hoarse whisper.

He came closer until his eyes, and they seemed of abnormal size glittering from behind the mask, were within an inch of mine.

“You are Josiah Quincy Hepburn, the millionaire, the Wall Street financier?”

This seemed to be more of a self-reassuring statement that he had made no mistake than a question, but by now I had recovered myself a little, and I answered him.

“I am,” said I, “What is the meaning of this outrage?”

“No harm,” said he gruffly. “No harm if you do as you are told. Now turn and walk ahead of me to the driving-off tee of your golf links.”

I had no choice but to obey. There was something in the cold ring of the fellow’s voice that did not invite question. I turned, and as I started along the path my steps crunched on the gravel.

“You are making too much noise”—curtly. “Walk on the turf.”

I did. It was quite dark under the trees, but as I reached their fringe and stepped out onto the open ground of the links I halted involuntarily at the sight of a great, white ghostly and grotesque object a few yards ahead. The next instant I recognized it—as I had every reason to do, since I had spent many days during the fall at aviation meets and in the examination of different makes and models with the idea of financing and marketing the one my fellow capitalists and myself should conclude was the most efficient and perfected.

“It’s—it’s a bi-plane!” I exclaimed.

My captor pushed his revolver into the back of my neck and shoved me forward. As we reached the machine he stooped suddenly and, producing a long, stiff, bulky affair, handed it to me.

“Put it on,” he directed.

“But—”

“Put it on!”

I put it on. It was a wind jacket of some hard, unyielding material that wrapped me from my knees to my neck.

“Now this,” he growled, and held out a face mask, punctured with great glass eye goggles.

I put that on, too. It was like his, I saw, which accounted for the uncanny glitter of his eyes when he had first confronted me.

“Get in, and take the seat on this side,” was the next order.

But here I balked. “I won’t!” I said stubbornly. “I don’t know what the meaning of this deviltry is nor what you’re up to, but you’ve gone far enough. I don’t propose to—”

“You’ll get in there alive,” he snarled, and the revolver punctuated his words as it tapped my breast, “or you’ll stay here—dead!”

I got in. In an instant he had given the thing a shove, jumped in beside me and the aeroplane on its little rubber-tired wheels began to coast gently down the slope from the driving-tee. Then suddenly, as it gained momentum, there came a crackle of fierce explosions, a mighty tugging strain, and with a whirr-r-r like the drumming of myriad partridges taking wing we rose into the air.

The most agonizing sensation seized me, as of a deathly nausea, while the pit of my stomach grew bottomless. I yelled and stood up. He caught me by the tail of my wind jacket and yanked me violently back onto the seat. Then he laughed—and the laugh sounded to me like a paean of ghoulish glee.

“You can make all the noise you like now and yell your lungs out,” he jeered. “I’ve got you. Only keep still in your seat, that’s all, or I’ll throw you out.”

I gasped and clung desperately to the hand rails. We were going higher and higher, up, up, up; and with a shuddering glance through the open frame work at my foot I caught, through black depths below us, the twinkling lights of a house—my house, perhaps.

The man at my side was chuckling to himself.

“I’m Christopher Kalb,” said he. “You’ve heard of me.”

“No, I haven’t!” I managed to fling back with some spirit.

“You have!” he shouted fiercely. “I tell you, you have. Everybody has. I’m Christopher Kolb, the inventor of the only air craft in the world that is practical.”

My blood, that was chilly before, froze in my veins. Much better that I had risked a shot from his revolver than this! I was up, great God, I was up in midair with a maniac! I understood it now only too bitterly well. I was in the hands of a mad inventor.

“I saw you at the aviation meets,” he went on, as the bi-plane soared higher in dizzy spirals and I lurched horridly in my seat. “You were talking to some of those poor fools who think they have solved the problem of the air with their pitiful toys. I heard you. You were talking about buying some of their patents. Now you’ll see mine, and then we’ll form a company together, you and me. You put up the money and we’ll make millions and millions.

I tried to contend myself and answer him with some degree of composure.      There was only one thing to do—humor him.

“All right,” said I. “I’m interested. Let’s go back to my place and talk business, We’ll go into the figures and see what kind of an agreement we can come to.”

“So we will, so we will,” he chortled, “But not yet. You haven’t seen what my machine can do. That’s what you’re here for.”

“I’m satisfied,” I said. “And the details, of course, would belong to the mechanical side of the business which would devolve on you.”

“Satisfied! Satisfied!” he screeched. “What are you satisfied of? You’ve seen nothing. You know nothing. You’re trying to deceive me. Now watch!”

A row of tiny electric bulbs at my feet, each over some recording instrument, burst into light. The roar of the exhaust from the engine behind quickened and rose into the deafening reports of artillery. A needle on one of the dials began to creep around.

“See it, see it, see it!” he cried. “That’s the speed meter. A hundred, a hundred and twenty—forty—sixty—two hundred miles an hour. I can make four hundred—a thousand! I’ll show you. Oh, the poor fools!”

“Stop it! Stop it!” I yelled frantically—and the words were beaten back into my throat by the terrific rush of air.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” he screamed. “I’m going down now closer to earth so’s you’ll see. I’ll give you the altitude test after. Look at the aerostat now; then look below.”

He whipped over a plane as he spoke, and in a sudden swoop, fast as the bullet from the muzzle of a gun, we shot earthward. Mechanically my eyes fastened on the aerostat for measuring the altitude. The pointer was flying backward from 2000 to 1800 to 1500—down, down, down. A white, fleecy mist was around us shutting out the stars above. In an instant this was gone and we were plunging through a dark, vaporous mass of cloud and I could see nothing either above or below. 1000—with clinched teeth and hanging grimly to my seat, my eyes fascinated, held on the aerostat. It swung back to 900, and then, as though a gigantic enveloping curtain had in a flash been wrenched aside, a panorama of dark-blotched masses of trees, interspersed with clearer spaces where little points of light scintillated like diamonds in the night, was opened out before me.

“Whoop! Whoopee, whoop-whoop!” shrieked the maniac, readjusting the planes. “Now, we’ll go. Straight ahead. I invented the engine, too. This is the controller, see? A million revolutions a minute.”

The engine, that in the course of our drop he must have shut off, now broke into a soul-terrifying uproar far greater than before—and the bi-plane streaked forward like an arrow.

Beads of cold sweat were on my forehead, desperately I grasped at the madman’s shoulders. “Mr. Kelb!” I shouted. “Mr. Kelb, take—”

He shook me off savagely and pointed his revolver at me.

“I’ll kill you,” he bellowed, “if you touch me again!”

I sank back nerveless. The needle of the speed meter was mounting steadily on the dial. We were skimming the earth at an altitude of 800 feet. I stared below and ahead of me. A red flare from a wide-flung furnace door shot suddenly upward, a thin luminous streak played along two white, glistening ribbons of steel, came a faint, dull, muffled rumble—and a train was lost in the distance behind.

“Ha! Ha, ha!” sneered the inventor. “The snail! Everything is a snail to me. See that?”—he pointed ahead. “That’s New York.”

A glow on the horizon, in color like simmering molten metal in a foundry pot, caught my agonized glance. It grew brighter with incredible rapidity, Masses of buildings took transient form, millions of lights blended into one, I saw a bewildering chaos of cars, streets, pygmy black shadowy objects that were people and horses, towers, spires, roofs, a fantastic checker-board—and that, too, was gone.

And now, stretching out as far as the eye could reach was a silvery, undulating sheen—the Atlantic was below us. My mouth was dry. I tried to speak and could only rasp out brokenly:

“Turn back! Turn back! You’re—you’re going out over the—the ocean. I’ll—I’ll—”

He punched me playfully in the ribs with the revolver muzzle.

“Turn back!” he echoed with a wild laugh. “We haven’t started yet. Ha, ha, you old geezer, what do you say to doing Piccadilly at midnight. That’ll please you, you old reprobate, eh? We’re going to England; and we’ll be there in three hours.”

The wind was whistling by us, playing on the tight-stretched plane-cloths above with a noise as of the rustle of heavy silk; the vibration of the tense-strung frame from the flying engine shook me until my teeth knocked together like castanets. A mad impulse to spring upon him, throttle him, murder him, swept over me, and only the realization that even if I succeeded I would be worse off than ever, since I would then be in the toils of a still more insensate master, the aeroplane itself, held me back. Then, as I thought, inspiration came to me.

“If—if you go to England,” I argued cunningly through chattering tooth, “I won’t be—be able to finance the company to-morrow.”

“We’ll be back in time,” he snapped, glaring at me balefully through his goggles.

“But we might not,” said I craftily. “Piccadilly is very enticing and we might be delayed, you see. We can’t afford to take any chances.”

“No. He, he! He, he!” he tittered. “No, that’s so. I’ll show you the altitude test, then.”

“No,” I protested earnestly. “There really isn’t any necessity. I am thoroughly convinced—”

“That’ll do!” he snarled. “We’re going up. Ha, ha! We’re going up—way up. These fellows with their ten thousand feet make me sick, What’s ten thousand? I can make fifty!”

I huddled, weak as a condemned man, back into my seat. The aeroplane was dancing in long spirals upwards. Then the circles became shorter and shorter and it seemed as though we were shooting like some spinning top up a vast, interminable aerial path. Banks of flying mist, stratas of heavier, darker clouds whisked by us. It began to grow cold.

“Yah!” yelled the maniac, rising half up in his seat and leaning over his levers. “Yah! Look at that! Twelve thousand and we’re going up, up, up!”

We swept in a breath into a denser mass of cloud than any before. It closed upon us, enwrapping us like a pall. A splash of rain struck my face.

“Up, up, up!” he screeched. “Up, up—”

A terrific boom of thunder rolled through the atmosphere around us. Then a great forked-tongue of lightning cut the blackness; while a gust of wind, that seemed to come from all quarters at once and converge upon us, set the aeroplane to rocking on its out-stretched pinions like a ship in an angry sea.

“Now I’ll show you what she can do in a sawbuck,” he screamed. “We’re between two impinging laterals, but that’s nothing. We’ll go right up into the storm centre and—”

Another crash of thunder, wilder than the first, swallowed up his words, another followed, and another; lightning fleshes after lightning flash rent the heavens around us; the wind, a mad tempest now, tore fiercely at the planes until they bent and quivered; the aeroplane like a straw in a vortex spun now this way now that, diving, rocketing, careening; above, around, below, the elements warred in wild delirium. I shrieked. I cried. I raved. It was as though the very gates of Inferno were burst wide open.

Peal on peal of demoniacal laughter came from the madman. His form seemed to grow into gigantic proportions; and then, in a sudden, fearful plunge as the bi-plane pitched forward, he lost his balance. Before my eyes, as I clung with superhuman effort to the hand rail of the seat, flashed a shuddering vision of a spinning form with great staring eye goggles, in my ears rang a blood curdling scream—and he went over the side and went hurtling into space.

A clap louder than the thunder sounded above me, and, ripping, tearing, a tangled mass, the plane-frames and cloths beat down upon my head enmeshing me. In the winking of an eye the wrecked and shattered aeroplane turned upside down, and dropped with me into the yawning gulf toward the sea twelve thousand feet below.

I fell. Down, down, down through the void. Horror struck at me. A great cold, chilling, numbing, was upon me. And then through the abyss and the abysmal awfulness, through the folds of entangling plane-cloths that were suffocating me, choking me, a clarion voice called my name.

“Josiah Quincy Hepburn!”

What mockery of my reeling brain was that! I was tumbling down, ever downward, sick with the horrid, fearful dizziness of falling. Down, down, down. The aeroplane whirled over and over. I caught a glimpse of the ocean. Mad with terror, I fought frantically to free myself from the ‘plane-cloths that ensnarled me. I was nearer the water now, nearer.—I tore at the cloths, my arms and hands beating furiously over my head like a windmill. In another instant I—thud!

“Josiah Quincy Hepburn,” cried the voice again, and I recognized it now as my wife’s voice—the tones colder than the chilly blast that blew in upon me from the open bedroom window.

“I have no objection to you sleeping on the floor if you prefer it, but you hand back those bedclothes and be right smart about it!”

The End.

[2600 words]