Posted by Thanatos on March 28, 2000 at 22:59:34:
F O R G I V E N E S S (c) Thanatos Reborn 2000
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In the dead of night, the darkness whispers.
At first, the words are indistinct, a dry rustling at the edge of thought, but they come closer, and become clearer, until finally it is a voice, speaking to her in her dream.
* * * * * *
Forgive
Forgive me
Forgive me, for I have sinned.
I know you can hear me.
I know you can hear me, wife.
I know you can hear me in your dreams, because I am here.
You needn't be afraid.
Please, don't be afraid.
I am in a Bad Place. It's not the Really Bad Place, but it's close. The Things here have spoken to me, and they have opened the Door to show me that place, and I have asked not to go there, so that's why I'm here to speak to you.
I don't want to go to the Bad Place.
That's why I'm here.
To ask you for your forgiveness.
I have to tell you the truth. I am compelled to tell you the truth.
I cannot lie, even if I wanted to.
I have to tell you something about the crash.
And when I have told you, They will know if you have forgiven me. And They tell me that this is important, but they won't tell me why. All I know is that I have to tell you about this.
You won't remember anything about this dream when you wake up.
Nobody ever remembers. The Things here make sure of that.
So let me tell you about the crash.
Let me take you back to the day my life as you know it ended.
Let me show you through my eyes.
Can you see?
This is me, sitting in seat 14A, on that morning in Amsterdam a lifetime ago.
* * * * * *
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT
Life vest under your seat
The familiar words stared back at me as I studied the seat back in front of me.
The stewardess was running through the futile safety demonstration, but I wasn't paying any attention. I guess I had paid attention the first twenty times, but now, I felt as if I could repeat them, word for word. I knew exactly where the emergency exits were, and how the oxygen masks would descend, and where the silly little whistle was on the lifejacket that was 'For Demonstration Purposes Only'.
I guess I always knew that the safety procedures were pointless, but it's funny how we sit through this charade, unthinking.
The Boeing 737-300 lumbered out to the main runway at Schipol Airport, crossing over the bridge that spanned the road, and I could see down onto the cars rushing under the bridge. Another weekday was getting under way in Amsterdam.
We were sixth or seventh in line for takeoff, and the tailfins of the other jets that lumbered ahead of us turned and moved like the sails of ships as we moved patiently up the queue.
At last the three 'dings' came that told the cabin crew that the aircraft was moving up for takeoff, and I took more interest now.
This was the bit I liked best, and as the twin General Electric CFM56s spooled up, then increased in rapid stages to the full 22,000lbs for takeoff, I sat back in my seat and luxuriated in the power.
The power, the speed, the push in the back, the rapid thumps from the seals in the tarmac as the Boeing raced forward. I loved this bit.
The aircraft reached its takeoff speed of one hundred and sixty-eight miles an hour, and moments later tilted it nose into the sky.
I felt the cushioning sensation as we made the transition into flight, and I could imagine the giant wheels, still spinning madly from takeoff, retracting into the belly of the aircraft and the doors closing shut on them with a dull thump beneath my feet.
Outside my window, the port engine powered us into the cool blue of the morning sky. I sat there, watching the rippling of the landscape behind the hot efflux of the engine, and I became aware that the woman in the aisle seat was craning her neck to look out of the window. The middle seat between us was empty on this flight, and she had to lean over to see out.
Unusual, that. Most females weren't interested in the aircraft, or what it was doing, but she was watching the flaps withdraw back into the wing as the aircraft settled into its climb to 33,000 feet.
I tried to look at her without seeming to. Mostly, I ignore my fellow passengers, and they ignore me, but this woman was different. She reminded me of you in many ways; she was bright and alert and intelligent. Lovely dark hair, and her eyes were shiny with health and life and energy. I risked a question:
'Are you interested in aircraft?'
Her gaze flicked to meet mine, and she laughed.
Lovely laugh.
'Oh, does it show so much?' she said. 'I'm an engineer at an aircraft maintenance company back there. I guess I can't leave my work behind when I travel.'
'Interesting work,' I ventured.
'Yes, it is,' she said, a little embarrassed, and she opened up her laptop and started booting up Windows, signaling the end of the conversation.
The drinks came, and I asked for a tomato juice, and she had a gin and tonic.
I'd left my notes in my hand luggage, and I didn't want to disturb her by asking her to get up, so I read the in-flight magazine while I waited for the meal service.
The meal came, and she put her laptop onto the spare seat between us to make room for her meal tray.
I looked out of the window while I ate my chicken. We had reached cruising altitude now, and there was nothing to see except clouds and bright sunshine, and the tiny movements of the ailerons.
I think that the accident happened then.
Yes, it was just after I'd finished the meal, but they hadn't come to clear the trays away, when something happened under the port wing, and the aircraft yawed violently. I remember the wing was flexing, shuddering up and down, and white smoke was pouring from under the wing, in great plumes that went above and below the wing. The 'ding dong' of the crew call went, and the stewardesses rushed forward towards the cockpit, and at that moment all hell broke loose.
The engine disintegrated.
Whole sections of the cowling and the thin skin covering the pylon tore off and zipped past the window, and the main fan tore out of the engine and exploded, spitting out turbine blades like whirling scimitars. The cabin several rows in front of us erupted in mayhem as three of the flying blades scythed through the thin aluminium of the fuselage.
Bright red blood splashed over the white ceiling, and there was screaming and cries as the cabin filled with a white fog, and the aircraft, still shuddering violently, continued to roll and dive to port, almost standing on its port wingtip. Papers and plastic cups and meal trays and bits of clothing whirled past in a hurricane of air as the aircraft lost pressurization.
More pieces of metal erupted from deep inside the engine, taking away chunks of the wing and the flaps, and through one of the gaping holes I could see the engine shuddering to pieces. Finally, with a shriek of metal it tore itself off the pylon mountings and fell away behind us in a long, graceful arc of smoke.
The aircraft lurched crazily.
We lost height in a stomach-churning fall, and the woman dug me sharply in the ribs and thrust something in my face.
The oxygen mask.
In my fright, I hadn't even seen them fall down, but there they all were, dangling down in quivering rows from the lockers, and hands were reaching up to pull them down and start the flow of oxygen. I pulled mine on, and then I felt dizzy for a while. I had waited too long, and I was suffering from tunnel vision. It cleared after a few moments, but the aircraft was still plunging madly down.
'Emergency dive!' the woman shouted, her words indistinct behind her mask. I stared at her, unable to understand.
'Emergency dive - we're descending to ten thousand feet so that we can breathe!'
I nodded, showing that I'd understood. Her hand reached out and gripped mine, and I drew enormous comfort from her touch. She had mastered her fear, and I was ashamed of my own, and I gulped in oxygen in panicked mouthfuls. The aircraft rolled back slowly, until it was almost upright again, and the starboard engine noise was rising and falling as the pilots got the plane back under control.
Something snapped in the wrecked ceiling in front of us, and a cable whipped about in the cabin, drawing cries of pain from a passenger caught in its path. Then another tore free, smacking into the overhead lockers.
The plane tilted over again, and the cries from the terrified passengers around us broke out afresh.
'Oh, Jesus,' the woman next to me said, and she sat back in her seat in terror. 'Control cables! It's severed the control cables!'
In the cockpit, out of our sight, the captain and the copilot strained at the madly jerking control columns, trying to get the dying giant under control. But with the port engine gone, and the flying controls compromised, they were fighting a losing battle. Alarms whooped and buzzed, patient female voices warned of danger, and there were too many, too many to deal with.
Next to me, the woman ripped off her facemask, and her eyes looked emptily at me. Her face crumpled. The aircraft continued to roll, and now we were heading towards the ground again, falling faster and faster. Loud screaming came from the cabin, and I pulled my mask off too. The air was filled with the stench of faeces and urine as terrified humans lost control of their voluntary muscles, and I gripped her hand tightly.
'What's happened?' I asked, the first words I had managed to get out, 'are we going to make it?'
She didn't answer for a second, then looked at me full in the eyes. By now, we were in a steepening dive, and we were both holding onto the backs of the seats in front as we fell forward, faster and faster.
'We're going to die. They can't recover it. We're going down. At least it will be quick,' she added with a wry smile, 'we won't feel a thing.'
'Why don't they do something!' I cried, unable to believe it.
'They can't,' she said, her voice shaking.
In the cockpit, sweat was forming in tight beads on the straining brow of the pilot as he realized they were losing the battle. Hydraulic fluid spurted slowly from the base of his control column, like blood from an artery, and indeed it felt as if his plane was dying, turning from the graceful thing that had graced the skies, into this plunging coffin that was falling out of the sky.
'Hey, it's been good to meet you.' She was talking again, and she put on a brave little smile, and I tried to smile back. She was calm again, and her bravery brought me back in control again, and I gulped my fear down.
I don't know what made me do it, but I raised my right armrest and slid across the unoccupied center seat, and she raised hers and did the same.
We held each other, cheek to cheek, and I realized I was crying. I had always wondered how I would react if my flight went down. Well now I knew.
'What's your name?' I asked in her ear, above the terrifying noise of the shrieking engines, the buffeting from the fall, and the pitiful, incoherent cries of the other passengers.
'Melanie,' she said, 'call me Mel.'
'Are you married, Melanie?'
'Nope,' she said, 'you?'
I nodded.
'I'll never have kids now,' she said to me, and at that moment our eyes met, and now is the time that I will know if you will forgive me, because I felt my penis stiffening with a rush of blood that came unbidden, and her eyes went dark and hard and cruel, and we were on each other.
To the sound of people that were screaming in pain, fear and terror, she mounted me in the seat, and tore her pantyhose open with her own nails, and we locked fingers and tore at her panties until they gave way, and my hands were scrabbling at my zip, and our flesh touched.
'Ohhh!' she cried in my ear as my penis pushed aside the folds of her labia, and she sank onto me with a sudden cry; I had forced past the hot dryness and her vagina was tight and moist inside her.
Eight thousand feet; and we plunged through the clouds, and their feathery touch couldn't hold us as we fell through them.
'Quickly, we've only got a couple of minutes!' she shouted above the noise and the cries, tearing at her shirt, pulling it aside, ripping off her bra, and now her breasts were level with my face.
'Eat me!' she yelled, and I bit her nipples, taking them full into my mouth and devouring her. She cried with desperate pleasure as my teeth bit into her, and she slid deeper round my penis, sinking onto me until she was impaled on me up to the hilt. I lunged forward, hammering her into the seat back behind her with savage thrusts, and she threw her head back and howled.
Six thousand feet; and the cockpit was a cacophony of sirens and strident voices that numbed the mind. Altimeters spun round like propellers, reeling off the seconds left to live.
Our bodies fought against each another, and we were panting with animal lust, oblivious to the other passengers round us, that wept in their seats or screamed to the ceiling.
One passenger stared, frozen, at his in-flight magazine, open at the map of Europe, his hands shaking.
Three thousand feet; and the engine noise rose to a shrill whine in the dense air, and warmer air rushed into the cabin.
'WE'RE GOING TO DIIIIIEEE!' yelled the man in front of our seats, and the cry drove us to new levels of desire, pulverising each other with a savage violence that only the dying can know. Her nails tore at my skin, and she sank her mouth onto mine, drawing blood with her teeth. Her hips thrust against mine in a desperate frenzy, and she started to pant as her orgasm rose.
One thousand feet; and the copilot put his face in front of his hands and yelled for his mother as the ground rushed up to greet us. A green field, a gate and some trees in the Essex morning.
'Ohhhhhh...' she moaned, and pulled back to stare me in the eyes, and her pupils dilated, but she didn't close her eyes as her orgasm broke, and she held me in that final stare, her agonized moan escaping from her open mouth, and my own orgasm built up inside me until it exploded inside her in a white-hot pain that transcended mortal life -
- and then all thought ceased.
* * * * * *
The Things here tell me that you can feel mass death down here; it's like a tremor that goes through your soul. It draws them, you see, and they came to the crash.
To gather the souls.
And that's when they found us.
Two souls locked in orgasm, and a hundred and forty in screaming despair.
We stood out like a beacon of light against those dark souls that had died alone.
Forgive me, for I have sinned.
And that's how I find myself here, in your dreams.
To ask forgiveness for what I did that day.
Well, they are calling me now, so I must go. I wish I could talk to you. I wish I could speak to you, one last time, and tell you that I am sorry, and I couldn't help it.
But now you know, and you must decide.
To err is human.
To forgive is divine.
Forgive me, for I have sinned.
Forgive me.
Forgive...
* * * * * *
In the dead of night, she turns over, and the dream fades back into the dark.
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Thanatos@reborn.com