Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories by Richard Matheson Page A

hands strike wildly at the shaggy mane. He clubs with his rifle butt.
      A scream. His face is torn off with one blow of thick claws. A jungle roar billows in the night.
      A red-eyed elephant tramples wildly through the mud, picking up men in its thick trunk, hurling them through the air, mashing them under driving black columns.
      Wolves bound from the darkness, spring, tear at throats. Gorillas scream and bounce in the mud, leap at falling soldiers.
      A rhinoceros, leather skin glowing in the light of living torches, crashes into a burning tank, wheels, thunders into blackness, is gone.
      Fangs-claws-ripping teeth-shrieks-trumpeting-roars. The sky rains snakes.
      Silence. Vast brooding silence. Not a breeze, not a drop of rain, not a grumble of distant thunder. The battle is ended.

      Gray morning mist rolls over the burned, the torn, the drowned, the crushed, the poisoned, the sprawling dead.
      Motionless trucks-silent tanks, wisps of oily smoke still rising from their shattered hulks. Great death covering the field. Another battle in another war.
      Victory-everyone is dead.
      The girls stretched languidly. They extended their arms and rotated their round shoulders. Pink lips grew wide in pretty little yawns. They looked at each other and tittered in embarrassment. Some of them blushed. A few looked guilty.
      Then they all laughed out loud. They opened more gum-packs, drew compacts from pockets, spoke intimately with schoolgirl whispers, with late-night dormitory whispers.
      Muted giggles rose up fluttering in the warm room.
      "Aren't we awful?" one of them said, powdering her pert nose.
      Later they all went downstairs and had breakfast.

    6 - MAD HOUSE

      He sits down at his desk. He picks up a long, yellow pencil and starts to write on a pad. The lead point breaks.
      The ends of his lips turn down. The eye pupils grow small in the hard mask of his face. Quietly, mouth pressed into an ugly, lipless gash, he picks up the pencil sharpener.
      He grinds off the shavings and tosses the sharpener back in the drawer. Once more he starts to write. As he does so, the point snaps again and the lead rolls across the paper.
      Suddenly his face becomes livid. Wild rage clamps the muscles of his body He yells at the pencil, curses it with a stream of outrage. He glares at it with actual hate. He breaks it in two with a brutal snap and flings it into the wastebasket with a triumphant, "There! See how you like it in there!"
      He sits tensely on the chair, his eyes wide, his lips trembling. He shakes with a frenzied wrath; it sprays his insides with acid.
      The pencil lies in the wastebasket, broken and still. It is wood, lead, metal, rubber; all dead, without appreciation of the burning fury it has caused.
      And yet…
      He is quietly standing by the window, peering out at the street. He is letting the tightness sough away He does not hear the rustle in the wastebasket which ceases immediately.
      Soon his body is normal again. He sits down. He uses a fountain pen.
      He sits down before his typewriter.
      He inserts a sheet of paper and begins tapping on the keys.
      His fingers are large. He hits two keys at once. The two strikers are jammed together. They stand in the air, hovering impotently over the black ribbon.
      He reaches over in disgust and slaps them back. They separate, flap back into their separate berths. He starts typing again.
      He hits a wrong key. The start of a curse falls from his lips, unfinished. He snatches up the round eraser and rubs the unwanted letter from the sheet of paper.
      He drops the eraser and starts to type again. The paper has shifted on the roller. The next sentences are on a level slightly above the original. He clenches a fist, ignores the mistake.
      The machine sticks. His shoulders twitch, he slams a fist on the space bar with a loud curse. The carriage jumps, the bell tinkles. He shoves the carriage over and it