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

into the living room.
      "Sally!" he screamed, "Sally, Sally, Sally…"
      The razor touched his throat. The room went black. Pain. Life ebbing away into the night. Silence over all the world.
      The next day Dr. Morton came.
      He called the police.
      And later the coroner wrote in his report:
    Died of self-inflicted wounds.

    7 - DISAPPEARING ACT

    These entries are from a school notebook which was found two weeks ago in a Brooklyn candy store. Next to it on the counter was a half finished cup of coffee. The owner of the store said no one had been there for three hours prior to the time he first noticed the book.

    Saturday morning early

      I shouldn't be writing this. What if Mary found it? Then what? The end, that's what, five years out the window.
      But I have to put it down. I've been writing too long. There's no peace unless I put things on paper. I have to get them out and simplify my mind. But it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complicated.
      Thinking back through the months.
      Where did it start? An argument of course. There must have been a thousand of them since we married. And always the same one, that's the horror.
      Money.
      "It's not a question of confidence in your writing," Mary will say. "It's a question of bills and are we or aren't we going to pay them?"

      "Bills for what?" I'll say. "For necessities? No. For things we don't even need."
      "Don't need!" And off we go. God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? The television set, the refrigerator, the washer-none of them paid for yet. And the bed she wants…
      But despite all, I-I with wide-eyed idiocy keep making it even worse.
      Why did I have to storm out of the apartment that first time? We'd argued, sure, but we'd argued before. Vanity, that's all. After seven years- seven! -of writing I've made only $316 from it. And I'm still working nights at the lousy part-time typing job. And Mary has to keep working at the same place with me. Lord knows she has a perfect right to doubt. A perfect right to keep insisting I take that full-time job Jim keeps offering me on his magazine.
      All up to me. An admission of lack, a right move and everything would be solved. No more night work. Mary could stay home the way she wants to, the way she should. The right move, that's all.
      So, I've been making the wrong one. God, it makes me sick.
      Me, going out with Mike. Both of us glassy-eyed imbeciles meeting Jean and Sally. For months now, pushing aside the obvious knowledge that we were being fools. Losing ourselves in a new experience. Playing the ass to perfection.
      And, last night, both of us married men, going with them to their club apartment and…
      Can't I say it? Am I afraid, too weak? Fool!
      Adulterer.
      How can things get so mixed up? I love Mary. Very much. And yet, even loving her, I did this thing.

      And to make it all even more complicated, I enjoyed it. Jean is sweet and understanding, passionate, a sort of symbol of lost things. It was wonderful. I can't say it wasn't.
      But how can wrong be wonderful? How can cruelty be exhilarating? It's all perverse, it's jumbled and confused and enraging.

    Saturday afternoon

      She's forgiven me, thank God. I'll never see Jean again. Everything will be all right.
      This morning I went and sat on the bed and Mary woke up. She stared up at me, then looked at the clock. She'd been crying.
      "Where have you been?" she asked in that thin little girl's voice she gets when she's scared.
      "With Mike," I told her. "We drank and talked all night."
      She stared a second more. Then she took my hand slowly and pressed it against her cheek.
      "I'm sorry," she said and tears came to her eyes.
      I had to put my head next to hers so she wouldn't see my face. "Oh, Mary," I said. "I'm