Allen thought he was going to die.
When the thought surfaced, he actually became less panicked. It was strange. It was as if some switch inside him that had been pulled taut all along had been flicked by something; the fear was still there, only pressed down somewhere deeper. He leaned back in his seat, the back of his head against the headrest, eyes open, staring straight ahead. The plane was still shaking, a violent shaking that seemed determined to fling its whole frame apart. He could hear his own teeth chattering, clacking together and blending with the stressed-metal groans from inside the plane until he couldn't tell which was louder.
The man up front was still standing.
The flight attendant had already shouted at him three times to sit down, her voice so shrill it had lost its tune. But the man acted as if he couldn't hear, his legs planted in the aisle, one hand clawing at the back of a nearby seat, his face nearly pressed to the window. Allen couldn't see his expression, only his back rising and falling, each breath faster than the last. Like a fish thrown up onto the shore by a wave.
"Old Chen, what are you doing! Sit down, come on!" the man's companion was yelling at him, his voice close to tears as well.
The man finally turned his head, his face ashen, his lips trembling badly. He said something, but before anyone around him could make it out, the plane plunged downward. It was exactly like an elevator suddenly snapping one of its cables. Allen's stomach seemed to fly up into his throat, and his whole body almost floated out of the seat. The man in the aisle was thrown straight backward, the back of his head slamming into an armrest with a dull thud.
A woman started screaming.
Allen didn't scream. He bit down on his own tongue, and it hurt so much it went numb. The old woman beside him had gone completely silent, as if she'd fainted. The old man was clutching her hand while twisting around to look out the window, his face like pale gray rock. Allen wanted to reach out and touch the old woman, but his own hand was shaking so badly that even lifting it was a struggle.
"Fuck... what the hell is this..." someone behind him swore, half sobbing.
Allen heard that sound again, coming in from outside the plane. It wasn't wind, and it wasn't like thunder, but a low, unbroken vibration, as though a gigantic bowstring were being slowly drawn inside the clouds. A droning hum that burrowed into the cracks between his bones. His teeth ached along with it, and his temples throbbed with pain. The colors outside the window, he had no idea how to describe. You couldn't call it sky anymore. The sky had no shape, but the thing outside did. It flowed like liquid, from gray to purple, from purple to black, lit now and then by that upside-down lightning, like an entire abyss slowly writhing.
He didn't want to look... But his eyes seemed nailed to that narrow gap at the edge of the window shade.
The lightning came again...
A single bolt, from the bottom up, shooting from some invisible floor deep within the clouds like a tree growing upside down, forking and forking again, every branch as fine as a hair yet blindingly bright. It was purplish red, edged in white. Allen watched the forks spread through the clouds, brief and fierce, like some kind of luminous fungal threads. Yet it didn't vanish with a crack the way ordinary lightning did. It lasted far too long, as though something were holding onto it and refusing to let it end.
"It looks like writing." Allen heard himself say it.
The old man beside him hadn't caught it and turned his head. "What?"
Allen didn't repeat himself. He didn't even know why he'd thought it. But the shapes of those lightning bolts, for one instant, really had looked like some kind of script. Enormous characters written into the clouds, their strokes crooked, as if burned there. Not any writing he recognized. But it looked like writing all the same.
He didn't believe in anything supernatural. Yet in this moment, there was only one thought in his head: this was definitely not weather.
The plane began to bank to the right, the angle growing steeper and steeper. People who hadn't fastened their seatbelts properly let out short cries as momentum flung them to one side. The man in the aisle hadn't managed to get back up, and he rolled away to the right again, his head hitting the underside of an armrest on the other side, and then he didn't move anymore. The cabin descended into chaos. The door of an overhead bin had come open a crack, and a scarf slipped out and draped softly across the aisle. Nobody cared.
"Pull the shades down! Don't look outside!" someone bellowed.
But nobody listened. The more frightened people were, the more they wanted to look. Most of the shades had already been lowered, but every time the plane tilted, one or two of them would jolt loose and slide back up on their own, letting the purple-black light from outside leak in, as though the whole cabin were being soaked in a thin layer of dark liquid. That light had weight to it. For the first time, Allen felt that light could make it hard to breathe.
"Mommy, I'm scared... Mommy, I want to go home..." The little kid up front had cried himself raw. His mother was holding him tight, crying herself, her hair plastered in a tangled mess across her face. When Allen's gaze swept over them, he saw her shoulders jerking, as though she wanted to press the child all the way into her own body.
He closed his eyes.
Ringing in his ears... Sharp, like a thin wire threaded from his left ear through to his right. He frowned and reached up to rub his ear, but the sound didn't fade at all; it only grew sharper. At the same time, beneath the roar of the wind outside, that low droning hum started up again. It seemed to come from directly below the plane, and also from every direction at once. Allen felt even his chest shaking along with it.
"Listen—" someone shouted, "it sounds like something's calling out!"
For a moment the cabin went quiet... Everyone was listening. The wind, the rain, the creaking of the airframe, and beneath it all that low, distant layer of sound that seemed to rise up from under the earth. It was too low. So low it didn't feel like it was coming in through the ears. Allen could only feel his heart twitching along with it, beating in a wildly irregular rhythm.
"Don't talk nonsense! That's the engines! It's the engines!" The flight attendant was still trying to calm everyone, but her voice had started to crack. She sat in her jump seat with her belt cinched tight across her waist, both hands gripping the partition in front of her, knuckles as white as bone.
She was scared too.
Allen buried his face in his hands. His hands were cold, and his forehead was colder. He didn't want to hear any more, didn't want to see any more. He thought about his phone, about that photo from the airport, about the Moments post he'd never sent in the end. That hesitant, insignificant moment now felt like something precious. If he'd known this would happen, he would have posted it. Anything at all would have done. At least the people who knew him would have known what kind of clouds he'd ended up in, at the very last.
"BOOM—!"
The plane lurched as if something had rammed it. It wasn't turbulence. Turbulence wasn't that hard. In that instant the whole fuselage leapt upward, then crashed back down. The back of Allen's head knocked against his seat, and everything went white before his eyes. His ears felt blocked, and every sound became very far away. He saw the oxygen masks drop from the panels ahead, a few yellow plastic cups swinging in midair like a row of little pendulums. Over the other seats, more masks were dropping one after another; some hit passengers on the head, and others just dangled there with nobody paying them any mind.
He tried to grab the one above his own head. But his hand was like waterlogged cotton, rising agonizingly slowly.
The old man beside him had already caught one first and was pressing it shakily over the old woman's face. She was still breathing, only her eyes were blank, as if she'd been scared out of her wits. The veins stood out all over the back of the old man's hands; those hands looked as though they had never gripped anything so hard in their lives. Allen finally caught hold of his own mask, yanked at the elastic a few times to stretch it open, fumbled it over his face, and took a breath.
Oxygen. It tasted a little like plastic.
His mind cleared a little, but the scene outside the window made him feel even more like he was dreaming. The lightning, the clouds, the colors—everything seemed to have been peeled away from the real world, leaving nothing but a madman's dream. He felt himself falling, and it wasn't the plane, and it wasn't his body, but something further inside him. As if he were being pulled right out of his seat and dropped into a gigantic, endlessly spinning funnel. He wanted to shout, but under the oxygen mask his lips only moved soundlessly.
Another bolt of lightning.
This one was especially close, so close it seemed to burst right against the window. The purplish-red light washed the entire cabin a ghastly white. Allen saw the face of the child in the row ahead lit a sickly blue, saw the man in the aisle lying motionless, saw a flight attendant with her eyes squeezed shut and her lips mouthing something. And then the lightning didn't fade right away. It hung there outside the window, like a glowing blood vessel dangling in the sky, growing thicker and brighter. The clouds spun rapidly around it, forming a gigantic, dark red whirlpool.
At the center of that whirlpool, it was utterly black.
Not the black of no light, but the black that everything falls into and nothing ever comes out of. It was like a mouth slowly opening.
Allen finally knew what that silhouette he'd seen earlier was. He didn't know what it was, but he knew they were about to go inside it.
The plane stopped struggling, as if the whirlpool had caught hold of it. The airframe began sliding along some arc, the metal letting out a groan that set his teeth on edge. The announcement system was completely dead. The lights had gone out too, leaving only the emergency lights and that terrible glow from outside flickering in turn. The passengers were pinned to their seats one after another, past even crying out loud. Some were praying, some were staring blankly, and some, like Allen, just stared fixedly at the darkness drawing closer and closer.
He wondered whether he ought to do something... Write something down, say something, but his mind was a total blank.
"Hold on tight!" the old man suddenly roared.
Before Allen could react, a tremendous force pressed him down into his seat. The plane began falling at high speed, not an ordinary drop, but as if someone had hurled it down from the sky. Everything outside the window was stretched into lines, the purple-black light, the reddish-white lightning, the spinning clouds, all of it turned into streaks of blurred light. His back went numb under the pressure of the momentum, and his ears felt stuffed with cotton; he couldn't make out any sound at all. His vision began to go dark, darker and darker...
In his last moment of consciousness, he suddenly remembered that dark red light that had looked like an eye.
Was it open now?